Sons of Prophecy : sequel to Mood Music
by whitehound
Summary: Snape has escaped from Voldie and rejoined the Order, but his friends have a new battle on their hands: to save him from Azkaban, and his own shredded nerves. He really hasn't time for a nervous breakdown: not when he's meant to be leading the war effort.
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us. 

This story begins in the New Year of 1998, just over six months after the end of _The Half-Blood Prince_. It is a sequel to my story _Mood Music_ (a.k.a. _Sound is a Horse_), which should ideally be read first. It is being written turn and turn about with a straight SF novel so it will probably be updated only once every two or three weeks, rather than once every two or three days as _Mood Music_ was. Those readers who haven't read _Mood Music_ yet, but who intend to, should probably skip the following paragraphs in italics, which summarize _Mood Music_ for the benefit of those who've read it but can't remember what happened, and contain spoilers. Unless you're like me, and usually read the last page of a book first to see if you're going to like it! 

**N.B.** I have a habit of using punctuation partly as musical notation, to control the rhythm of a sentence and thereby to indicate inflection of both speech and thought. This means basically that I omit commas after quotes, in cases where I feel that the dip in emphasis caused by the comma would spoil the music of the line, and sometimes insert commas where I think that the speaker/thinker would pause slightly, even if a comma isn't grammatically necessary at that point. This is not an error, this is a stylistic quirk - so please don't bug me about it.

* * *

**The Story So Far:**

Dumbledore ordered Snape to kill him on the Astronomy Tower but Snape in fact refused to do so, instead faking Dumbledore's death by saying Avada Kedavra without meaning it (which we know does no harm at all), whilst silently flipping him over the wall with Levicorpus to get him away from the Death Eaters. He does not know whether Dumbledore actually survived or not since he had a long fall and was already both cursed and poisoned, but if Dumbledore is alive then he has been spirited away into hiding by Horace Slughorn. Initially everyone else believed that Snape did murder Dumbledore and it is imperative that Bellatrix at least should continue to believe it, because if she realizes that Snape broke the Unbreakable Vow to which she was witness and Bonder, Snape will die. 

Shortly before Dumbledore's death, Percy Weasley spotted that a Ministry official had been Imperiused and this caused Voldemort's plans to take over the Ministry, and Hogwarts, to fail. The Ministry's decision to close Hogwarts and use it as an administrative base further diverted the timeline from the one in Deathly Hallows_, so that Snape never became Headmaster and Voldemort's forces remained in hiding. _

Snape was left stranded among the Death Eaters for months, without a friend he could call his own or any chance to use the Pensieve to prepare himself mentally before entering Voldemort's presence, as he usually did. Some time in the first two weeks of the December following the end of HBP, Voldemort became suspicious enough to set Snape a test of loyalty, which he failed (by refusing to take part in the sexual abuse of a child). Snape was imprisoned at an underground Death Eater base in the vast, ancient mine-working called Chislehurst Caves, and subjected to extreme torture. 

Meanwhile, Voldemort and his minions had been investigating what powers might be possessed by Muggle psychics and occultists, with the intention of either recruiting or destroying them. Two days after Christmas a battered and traumatized Snape and a bemused Muggle shaman named Lynsey O'Connor escape together, and spend two and a half days blundering about in the darkness of the mines. Initially they are being pursued by the Death Eaters, but by the time they finally find a way out the boot is rather on the other foot - thanks to Snape's inventive way with hexes and a creative bit of psychological warfare involving nihilistic music. In the process Snape and Lynsey become good if slightly edgy friends, royally piss off Lucius and are tentatively assisted by Draco. They are also forced by circumstances surgically to remove Snape's Dark Mark. 

As an act of terrorism, rubbing the Order's noses in their own helplessness, Voldemort had caused members of the Order of the Phoenix to hear Snape screaming and pleading under torture - Voldemort being a psychopath with no understanding of friendship or compassion, and therefore being unable to predict that this would make the Order more inclined to sympathise with Snape and listen to his point of view, rather than shooting first and asking questions later as they might otherwise have done. By the time Snape, with Lynsey still in tow, staggers into an Order base-camp on New Year's Eve suffering not only from the after-effects of torture but from pneumonia, Poppy Pomfrey, Minerva McGonagall and Remus Lupin at least are inclined to listen to his version of the story and give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Harry is reluctantly and grudgingly persuaded that Snape is probably still a loyal member of the Order, even if he still doesn't like him much, and they talk out enough of their differences to be able to work together. Lupin, more wolf than man, cheerfully announces that in Dumbledore's absence Snape is now his alpha male - about which Snape is somewhat less than ecstatic. But Mad-Eye Moody is still convinced that Snape is a traitor and a murderer, and that the fact that he was tortured by Voldemort only proves that he is entirely self-serving and betrayed both masters. 


	2. 01 Silence is Pronounced

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us. stylistic quirk - so please don't bug me about it.

* * *

**1: SILENCE IS PRONOUNCED**  
((_In which Mad-Eye Moody and the Ministry of Magic behave about the way you would expect them to._))

She supposed she should be grateful that the Order of the Phoenix's encampment in the Lakelands came under the regional _aegis_ of the new, Hogwarts-based Scottish branch of the Ministry of Magic, and that Scotland shut down for two whole days at Hogmanay, and two more over the weekend that followed - otherwise they would have come for him on the Friday. As it was, by the time the Aurors arrived to arrest him, at eight o'clock on a cold Monday morning four days before his thirty-eighth birthday, he had at least gotten to have his hot bath and his treacly coffee, and on the Sunday Poppy Pomfrey had allowed him to sit up in an armchair for a few hours, instead of spending the whole day in bed.

Her intention, if she had thought much about it, had been to wait until she was sure he was safe and comfortably on the mend, and then return to her work and her cats in St Andrews - although she hoped, she most sincerely hoped, that she would be able to keep in touch with him on a very regular and frequent basis. But that would have required Fate to cut him some slack and Fate, it seemed, was determined to be a bitch.

For as long as she lived, Lynsey thought, she would never forget being woken on that freezing morning by the sound of the doors being flung open, and scrabbling up from a deep sleep to see the shadowy, robed forms seizing her lanky professor in rough hands and hauling him from his bed. For a dreadful moment she thought it was the Death Eaters, come to take him back to the torture, and barefoot as she was she was already half out of bed and preparing to kick the nearest one in the groin before she heard Poppy's furious voice, shouting something about "Ministry thugs," and there was a crack and snap of spells being aimed and parried.

"Poppy, no!" her professor - Snape - said sharply. "Don't antagonize them. Tell Minerva - " One of the Ministry types slapped him across the face, so hard that he would certainly have fallen if he had not been pinioned between two of the others, and bellowed _"Silencio!"_ Lynsey completed the surge from bed to floor in one frantic lunge and delivered the kick with emphasis. The - Aurors, she supposed they were - seemed reluctant to use spells to subdue a Muggle and unsure how to fight any other way, and she had already hauled off for another kick before she saw Snape frantically shaking his head at her, still looking deathly pale and ill and trying to mouth some instruction or other, but unable to produce a sound. With a sinking heart she realized that she was outgunned and outnumbered (even with one down and clutching his crotch) and that all that she was doing was storing up reprisals for him.

And he was gone, as suddenly and as finally as if he were a dream she had woken from, and she and Poppy were left alone together, shaking with impotent rage and shock.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Four days - four days of desperate nothing. Four days of Minerva McGonagall and Poppy and Lupin huddling together, trying to build up a convincing defence case without revealing that Snape had broken his Unbreakable Vow by refusing to kill Dumbledore - information which would condemn him to a magically enforced death if Bellatrix Lestrange heard of it. But not revealing it might condemn him almost as surely.

Snape, it seemed, had wanted to go before a formal Board of Enquiry in any case, in order to clear his name, and he and Minerva had already started work on his statement; but trying to complete it without him was a nightmare and the Ministry refused point-blank to allow any of them to speak to him. Lynsey couldn't even get a very clear psychic impression of him, despite their tentative closeness; his mind was too slippery, too well-warded, and all she could feel from him was rigidly-controlled fear and a sort of ground-in, accepting unhappiness which turned her stomach.

Lynsey herself was deeply shaken; strung out with nerves and shock and unable to settle, or eat, or sleep. To have come so far, to have escaped the Death Eaters and seen her professor through to what should have been safety, only to have him seized and mishandled by his own people, seemed doubly horrible. She, though, was suddenly greatly in demand. She could hardly have gone home now anyway, with her professor under arrest and in danger, and had made arrangements for neighbours to continue feeding the cats; but with Snape gone and no idea when, or if, he would return, the information which he had drilled into her brain during their journey was suddenly vital to the Order.

To her surprize and unease she found herself being debriefed by Alastor Moody; who was now _persona non grata_ with most of the Order, since everyone suspected that it was he who had alerted the Aurors to Snape's return. For reasons of politics she bit back her anger and tried to stay on the right side of the man, but in truth she found herself feeling rather sorry for him. As a witch she could be objective enough to see that he was as sad and bitter as her professor, with rather less self-knowledge and self-control, and he really had loved Albus Dumbledore. The realization that Snape had indeed brought them real and useful information, and had made contingency plans for that information still to be conveyed to the Order in the event of his death, left him shamed and discomfited, although he tried to hide it under his characteristic bluster.

In fact it was Moody himself and a tall black man called Kingsley Shacklebolt, the other high-ranking Auror in the Order, who persuaded the Ministry to grant Lynsey auxiliary status, leaving her memories of the wizarding world intact but spell-binding her not to convey them to any outsider, as was done with the families of Muggleborn wizards and witches. The ostensible reason was that Obliviating her at this stage, when almost two weeks would have had to be cut out of her brain and replaced with a harmless fiction, could cause dangerous complications and leave her with a head full of half-memories. In truth it was because - to her horror - there was apparently a very real risk that Snape would be executed or imprisoned for life, and they would never again have any access to his memories except for the legacy he had left in Lynsey's head.

Moody's new-found conscience and Shacklebolt's influence did not, unfortunately, extend as far as getting anybody from the Order in to see Snape. The Ministry of Magic, it seemed, regarded the Order of the Phoenix as dangerous mavericks, and the fact that Shacklebolt was even a member was a closely-guarded secret; especially since it was suspected that the Unnameable One had his own spies at the Ministry. A junior administrator named Weasley, the estranged son of the red-haired man who had been so pleasant to Snape, had actually spotted the fact that three senior officials had been acting under Imperius: but there was no guarantee that they were the only ones, or that there were no sincere, non-Imperiused Death Eaters lurking in the Ministerial woodwork. Lynsey, already slightly hysterical with frustration and anxiety and sorrow, was reminded of the traditional tag that "All organizations are staffed by agents of the opposition."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

And after four days, the 9th of January - the feast of Janus Two-Faced, called the Agonalia, the slaying of the ram of sacrifice. Friday the 9th of January 1998, the trial of her bold professor - the trial, and his birthday. Lynsey wasn't sure whether that was just an unhappy coincidence, or a deliberate, added cruelty. On the Friday that Snape was thirty-eight years old, she travelled to London with a grimly subdued Minerva McGonagall, a tear-stained Poppy and the rest of them, going by the same awkward, jerking method Lucius Malfoy had used to kidnap her off a Croydon street, thirteen days and a lifetime ago.

She knew roughly where they were, she thought - somewhere in the maze of shabby streets and dingy offices that lay around and behind the more prosperous main thoroughfares of the City of London. Around a corner, and there was more of the same - sad offices inhabited by sad workers, an even sadder and grubbier-looking pub, ancient concrete lamp-posts of the sort that would shine like blood-oranges in the dark, a blank wall covered with stark, threatening-looking graffiti and standing by it a vandalized telephone-box - the old red kind, with smashed window-panes and its works hanging out like a disembowelled sofa. It was a measure of how run-down the area was that the telephone actually had a dial rather than buttons - it must have been decaying here, unrepaired, for donkeys' years.

She was surprized, then, when McGonagall, grim-faced, marched straight to this battered box and ushered them all in after her. The five of them crammed in like a surreal game of Sardines and McGonagall dialled 62442 on the antique rotating dial. Instantly, a disembodied female voice, cool, level and (to Lynsey's ears, anyway) obviously artificial, spoke out of empty air. "Welcome to the Ministry of Magic. Please state your names and business."

"Miss Lynsey O'Connor; Mr Harry Potter; Madam Poppy Pomfrey; Professor Remus Lupin; Professor Minerva McGonagall. Witnesses for the Defence," McGonagall said crisply, "appearing at the trial of Professor Severus Snape." The final witness, the red-headed man called Arthur, was to meet them at the Ministry, where he apparently worked.

"Thank you" said the level, mechanical voice. "Visitors, please take the badges and attach them to the front of your robes." The returned-money chute clattered harshly and five silver pin-on badges fell down into its open maw. Lupin handed Lynsey hers in silence, and as silently she read what was stamped there. "Lynsey O'Connor, witness for Severus Snape, murderer."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Visitors to the Ministry," said the smooth voice, which was already getting on Lynsey's nerves until she wanted to punch something, "you are required to submit to a search and present your wands for registration at the security desk, which is located at the far end of the Atrium." With that the whole telephone-box began to sink, lift-like, into the ground. Lynsey saw the cut-off edge of the pavement rise up past her eyes and then they were going down and down in darkness, deeper and deeper into the very pits of Hell, it felt like, and she caught her breath and wondered what dungeon they were taking her to, and in what conditions her brave and brisk professor was being kept.

But golden light spread up round their feet, and further up. "The Ministry of Magic wishes you a pleasant day" said the infuriating voice, and the door sprang open and disgorged them into a vast, confusing space full of light and colour and bustling life.

It gave Lynsey a headache just looking at it. Scores, maybe hundreds of exotically and bizarrely-clad men and women were scurrying this way and that, their lurid, upside-down mirror-images dancing along with them, reflected in the highly-polished darkness of the wooden floor. Arcane golden runes of some kind, blindingly bright, twisted and writhed across a ceiling enamelled a deep, peacock blue. As McGonagall swept their small party with her down the length of the great hall she could see gilded fireplaces set down both the long sides of the room, burning with green flames. These seemed to function like some sort of transporter-pad, with wizardly commuters materializing out of the flames to her left side and disappearing into them on her right.

As anxious as she was about Snape, Lynsey still couldn't help rubber-necking a bit. If nothing else, it distracted her slightly from feeling sick with nerves. Halfway-down the hall was a circular pool, with a central plinth on which sat the gilded, larger-than-life statue of a disconsolate-looking witch, her chin resting on one hand, the other holding the broken stump of a wand from which a thin trickle of water dribbled into the pool, which Lynsey could see was scattered with bronze and silver coins. On either side of the witch, sulkily avoiding looking at either her or each other, were statues of what Lynsey recognized as a house-elf, with water leaking from the tips of his or her drooping ears, and a similar but slightly larger and even more sinister-looking creature with one ear missing, and a sad rain dripping from the tip of its pointed, sagging hat. Next to the pool were two notices: a small, scruffy one which said something about proceeds going to St Mungo's Hospital, and a somewhat larger one, which had been in place long enough for the letters to have started to fade, which read "Fountain of Magical Brethren currently under repair."

Facing them at the far end of the Atrium were what looked like gilded, wrought-iron gates: or were they actual gold? As they approached the gates, an amiably dozy looking witch seated at a desk under a sign which said "Security" waved them over and began scanning them in some way, passing a thin, flexible golden rod over each person's front and back. She seemed disposed to be chatty, especially to Harry, but when she caught sight of the lettering on Poppy's badge her face changed abruptly and she became curt and openly cold. She weighed each person's wand in a sort of one-sided brass scale, tore off the print-out which extruded from a slot in the base and spiked it, all in grim silence.

When it came to Lynsey, the security-witch held out her hand. "Wand. Well, come on then - I don't have all day."

"I - uh - don't have one."

"Oh" the witch said coldly. "The Muggle. I'd heard there was one: I suppose it's only what you'd expect from that - "

"From that _what_?" Lynsey asked sharply, but McGonagall seized her upper arm in a grip like a vice and hurried her through the gates.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Arthur Weasley, looking even more anxious and careworn than usual, met them on the far side of the gates, in a smaller hall whose sides were lined with twenty or more old-fashioned chain-driven lifts, each set behind a grille made of the same gilded wrought-work as the gates. He pressed the button to summon a lift, and the nearest grille opened on its own, with an echoing clank. The interior of the lift was dimly lit by an antique-looking lamp swaying from the ceiling, but by it Lynsey could make out a column of fairly modern buttons, with their destinations written beside them. She wondered idly what "Ludicrous Patents" were: but Arthur pressed the only button lower than "Atrium", and took them even further down, into the bowels of the London clay.

There were three other people in the lift with them, all wearing expressions of grim, self-righteous satisfaction which made Lynsey sick to her stomach. "Department of Mysteries" said that same smooth female voice, and the lift opened onto a bare stone corridor, lit by wavering, guttering torches and with no door except for a plain black one at the far end. McGonagall's party let the smug trio go on ahead, not wishing to associate with them, and Lynsey saw that the three turned left just before that ominous door.

And yes - they were all going to the same place. Arthur led the rest of them round the same corner and through an open doorway onto stairs which angled steeply down again, even deeper, leading to a second corridor. But this one had much rougher stone walls, fitfully lit by more burning torches in brackets, and Lynsey realized that they must be so far down they had left the London clay and entered bedrock. The resemblance to a working dungeon was depressing, and as they walked along in the flickering light they passed heavy wooden doors, bolted from the outside with massive iron bolts and very emphatic keyhole-locks. Lynsey, feeling even sicker, wondered unhappily if her professor was locked in - shackled, even - behind one of these oppressive doors.

And here was a dark, grubby door, which looked as though it had been often handled and never washed, with an equally heavy lock; but instead of a bolt it had a great iron handle, which Arthur turned, pushing the door open and stepping through.

It opened into the corner of a very large, square, high-ceilinged room, lined with plain dark stone and lit only by more of the Mediaeval-looking torches, which gave little light but added to the sinister ambience. There were three staggered tiers of benches stretching up every wall and full almost to capacity - there looked to be several hundred people present. At the end facing them, the upper two tiers formed a separate balcony, above head-height and accessed by stone steps. This balcony was filled with grim-faced witches and wizards wearing plum-coloured robes, with an elaborate silver W worked on the left breast.

But it was what sat at dead-centre of the room which transfixed Lynsey's gaze. A heavy chair, almost a throne, but there were strong chains wrapped around the arms, and to her heightened nerves it looked like an electric chair. To either side there were three plain, church-hall-type seats, and Arthur Weasley quietly guided their party across the stone-flagged floor to sit down under the disapproving eyes of the crowd; McGonagall, Harry and Lupin on one side of the central chair and himself, Lynsey and Poppy on the other.

The hall seemed filled with whispering and hostile stares. As Lynsey sat down demurely in the seat provided, trying her best not to shake with nerves, Arthur gestured to the group of witches and wizards at their left and murmured "The jury." She looked where he had pointed, and her heart sank further; this lot looked even more grim and hostile than the general audience.

Again, Arthur gestured, this time at the plum-coloured crowd on the balcony above them. "The Wizengamot, the Wizards' High Court. Rufus Scrimgeour, the Minister for Magic himself, is presiding - that's him at centre-front." And these were surely no better; Scrimgeour himself looked like an eagle searching for prey, his eyes fixed on the door they had entered by.

Thanks to McGonagall, Lynsey already knew enough about wizarding court-procedures to know she didn't like them. There would be no Council for the Defence. The Wizengamot, theoretically neutral and independent, was presided over by a Chief Warlock - a position once held by Dumbledore himself - but in practice the power lay in the hands of the senior Ministry official involved: usually the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, but in this case the Minister himself. There would be three interrogators, including the Ministry official and two from the Wizengamot, who would cross-examine both prosecution and defence witnesses, insofar as those terms were meaningful. The Wizengamot as a whole would then decide on the defendant's guilt or innocence, but it was almost unheard of for them to go against the wishes of the Ministry. The jury existed only to endorse whatever sentence the Wizengamot chose to impose - and again, it was almost unheard-of for them to fail to do so. There was nobody here to speak for Snape except himself, if he chose to - himself, and their ragged little band.

Somewhere at her back she heard the click as the iron handle was turned, and the hissing mutter of the crowd spiked and fell ominously silent. The sound of the door opening, footsteps - several footsteps, and she fought the urge to turn in her seat as the hissing whisper started up again, louder this time and more aggressive, as malign as a wasps' nest. Craning over her own shoulder she saw her professor being brought in between two burly guards. At least it was human guards nowadays, not Dementors, but they looked like a pair of hired thugs, and between them Snape walked like a wisp of shadow, still wearing the thin robes he had slept in four mornings ago, his gaunt face pale and weary and decorated with several new bruises which hadn't been there on Monday but at least, despite his obvious ill-health, he came on with a firm stride and his head high, shaking the two guards off as if they were mere grubby annoyances as he took his place in the chair of chains, two places to Lynsey's right.

As the chains burned briefly golden and sprang to life in a way which turned Lynsey's stomach, binding his arms so tightly to the wood that he was forced to hunch his shoulders slightly, and the hissing of the crowd rose to a crescendo and began to spill over into open jeering, and Rufus Scrimgeour rose to his feet and stared down at him like an eagle preparing to swoop down on a rabbit, Snape gripped the wood so tight that the knuckles shone whitely through his skin and continued to stare straight ahead, rigidly composed.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"We are gathered here" said the hawk-like Minister in a fierce, cold voice which froze the audience into instant silence, "to hear evidence in the case of Severus Snape, known Death Eater, in the matter of the murder of Albus Dumbledore, Chief Warlock Emeritus of the Wizengamot, a colleague and friend to many of those here present, and known to us all as one of the most eminent wizards of modern times."

"Criminal proceedings of the ninth of January," he continued more formally, "to enquire into the involvement of Severus Tobias Snape in the sudden death of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizarding on the fourth of June nineteen ninety-seven. Interrogators: Rufus Aloysius Scrimgeour, Minister for Magic; Laurent Armand Macpherson, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement; Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, Secretary to the Minister. Court Scribe, Percy Ignatius Weasley." Lynsey glanced sharply at the rather smug-looking red-headed clerk and then at the older man beside her, but Arthur Weasley was staring studiously off into the middle distance. "Calling the Witness for the Prosecution, Harry James Potter of number four, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey."

"Defence," Harry muttered, standing up from his place between McGonagall and Lupin and shooting Snape a rather poisonous look.

"I beg your pardon?" said the Minister, arching his impressive pepper-and-salt eyebrows like tawny wings.

"Witness for the Defence" Harry replied, loudly and sulkily, and it was then that the nightmare really began.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It felt to Lynsey as if they were seated at the bottom of a well, the focus of a burning-glass of hatred turned on the professor and his supporters, surrounded as they were by rank above rank of disapproving faces and hostile whispers. "You stand there and tell us," Scrimgeour said scornfully, "that you know that Albus Dumbledore was willing to give his life for The Cause because he ordered you to feed him what you think might have been poison, and yet you refuse to tell us the circumstances?"

"I told you, I - I can't. It's a secret. Professor Dumbledore's secret. But it was definitely some sort of poison, and he knew it."

"You say that when Dumbledore realized that he had been poisoned he specifically asked for Professor Snape by name, speaking as if no-one else would do?" Macpherson, at least, seemed genuinely interested in weighing up the evidence with an open mind, but before Harry could answer he was steam-rollered by the Minister.

"I don't think anybody is in any doubt that Dumbledore trusted this... person: the question is whether he did so unwisely," Scrimgeour said smoothly.

"What would you care anyway?" Harry demanded, angrily and, indeed, unwisely. "You never liked Professor Dumbledore anyway - you tried to turn me against him."

The Minister drew up his shoulders like a mantling eagle and glared down at Harry. "Clearly, the boy is delusional," he said softly.

After that, it was downhill all the way.

When it was Lynsey's turn to be quizzed, she did the best she could, assuring the court that Snape had told her that he had fired on Albus Dumbledore on the man's own orders, and yes, yes, she knew he had been angry, he had told her he was - he had been angry with Dumbledore for giving him that order against his wishes. But no, she couldn't be absolutely certain he wasn't just saying that to cover his own back but why would he bother to tell her about it at all, if he had anything to hide? But when it came down to it all she could really say was "I trust him" and that, as the Minister kindly pointed out, wasn't worth the parchment it wasn't written on, because whichever side you believed Snape was truly on, either way he had deceived one of the best Legilimens on record.

And all the while out of the corner of her eye she could see the professor sitting two places to her right, his back forced into an uncomfortable half-crouch by the tightness of the chains, his pale face grimly composed, even when McGonagall and Poppy Pomfrey on either side of him silently rested their hands over his. As Minerva McGonagall and Arthur Weasley spoke up for him, describing his loyal service to the Order of the Phoenix and the trust in which Dumbledore had held him, his expression never changed, although his lips tightened even more than before when Poppy Pomfrey described his many injuries. But the fact that he had undeniably been tortured proved nothing, as Scrimgeour loftily informed the Court: if he had been willing to risk being tortured in order to serve the Order of the Phoenix, he might equally well have submitted to torture for the sake of He Who Must Not Be Named, to make a convincing cover-story.

Only when Remus Lupin stood up in turn to speak for him did something else - surprize, perhaps, or even amusement - flicker briefly across his face; but Lupin was, as Lupin himself had feared, not a particularly useful character witness. The Minister and Ms Pouncer were smugly, smoothly snide about what they called his "condition" and the effect that the imminent arrival of the full moon (due to appear on Monday night) might be having on his judgement. And his firm assertion that he knew Snape to be an honest man because he could _smell_ that he was only brought a ripple of tittering across the galleries.

They were, all of them, horribly out of their depth, and being toyed with. It was only when, finally, Scrimgeour called Snape himself to speak in his own defence that the sense of power in the room shifted. Ill as he was, unable even to straighten in the terrible chair and look his accuser properly in the face, his composed manner and his ringingly clear voice still commanded universal attention.

"I swear to you," he said, his voice clear and low and carrying, the narrow, intense flame of his face shining like ivory in the wavering torchlight, "that I would never have killed Albus Dumbledore of my own will, or on the orders of anyone other than himself. I cannot, I _cannot_ submit to Veritaserum in front of the general court because of the sensitivity of the information which I carry, and in any case I am sure the Minister is aware, as I am, that Veritaserum is not entirely effective when used on an experienced Occlumens. I can offer you no proof save my own word: but I swear to you that I killed him only because he himself wished it so."

And that, as Lynsey and everyone else in McGonagall's party knew perfectly well, was a thundering lie.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Is there anyone else in this court who has anything to add before we reach our verdict?" Macpherson asked.

"Sir," McGonagall said, firmly but with a faint trace of desperation, her rrr's rolling noticeably as she addressed her countryman, "you must believe me. Severus Snape is an honest man and a brave one who has already suffered greatly in the battle against He Who Must Not Be Named. Yet instead of his sacrifice being recognized, I find myself here saying, in the words of the Muggle poet:

"I have been young, and now am not too old;  
And I have seen the righteous forsaken,  
His health, his honour and his quality taken.  
This is not what we were formerly told."

"Unfortunately," said Macpherson softly, inclining his head, "righteousness is more often punished than rewarded," and he turned away from her and went to join the rest of the Wizengamot in their heated debate.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"In short," said Rufus Scrimgeour, smiling his false politician's smile, "we have here the testimonies of a Muggle, a werewolf, an immature boy with a known history of mental disturbance, a minor Ministry functionary with a record of questionable decisions and, oh, yes - a sheltered elderly lady who hasn't left Hogwarts in over twenty years. None of whom, for whatever reason, is willing to submit to questioning under Veritaserum. Not forgetting the testimony of Mr Snape himself, a known and undeniable Death Eater - his crude attempt to remove the brand which marked him as the servant of He Who Must Not Be Named notwithstanding.

"By Mr Potter's own statement, given to a Ministerial Board of Enquiry on the third of August last year, Severus Snape used an Unforgivable Curse on Albus Dumbledore in full view of several witnesses including Mr Potter himself, to the loss of his life, and he did so with rage and hatred in his face as Albus Dumbledore begged him for mercy. Mr Potter's subsequent change of mind, for whatever reason, does not supercede his original eye-witness testimony. Members of the jury, are we agreed?"

He drew himself to his full, impressive height and fixed a look of pure malice on - no, not on Snape, on Harry. Why on Harry? "Severus Tobias Snape, you put out the sun of the wizarding world, and so I sentence you to live your life out of sight of the sun, and out of the sight of man: hereafter no one will ever look you in the eye again. You silenced the voice of perhaps one of the greatest wizards of all time, and so I condemn you to live out the rest of your life in silence. Other than during such interrogations as the Ministry may think fit, mine will be the last voice that will ever speak to you, and these are the last words, whether written or spoken, which will ever be addressed to you."

If he had been trying for a crack in Snape's iron composure, he succeeded then, for the professor blanched deathly-white and gasped as if he had been punched in the gut. But as Minerva McGonagall rose to her feet and began to shout, he clamped his lips to a thin line again and stared blindly straight ahead.

* * *

**Author's note:**

"I have been young, and now am not too old;" - Edmund Blunden, _Report on Experience_.

This chapter has been slightly re-edited to bring it in line with the new _Deathly Hallows_ backstory. Snape has been made a year younger, and a mention has been added of Percy realizing that some Ministry officials were under Imperius, to explain why this timeline diverged from the main one.


	3. 02 Counsels of War

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**2: COUNSELS OF WAR**  
((_In which various decisions are reached._)) 

Lynsey huddled on the infinitely extensible back seat of the little car which Harry had called a Weasley Special, clutching her head and feeling as if she had the world's worst hangover. "Oh gods oh gods did I really call the Wizengamot a bunch of fuckwits?"

"Yes dear," Minerva McGonagall said with pursed lips. "I agreed completely."

The previous hour or so was a blur to her - her tongue tasted like the floor of a parrot's cage and her heart was trying to beat sideways in vicarious panic. Sickly, she remembered how the sentence of unending isolation had made Snape whiten as the mere threat of Azkaban had not, although Scrimgeour's promise that no voice would ever speak to him again had been immediately disproven as herself, Minerva, Lupin, Harry _et al_ had all begun calling out to him and shouting abuse at the Minister, and Lynsey had embarrassed both Snape and herself by breaking down in tears, and -

Oh. Gods. As Arthur Weasley took the car round a corner at speed she shook her head, not sure whether she was trying to clarify the memory or shake it off. They had come for him, the two guards, in perfect silence, and in silence they had jerked him to his feet and away from her under the eyes of the silent, hating crowd. As he was dragged backwards towards the door to the cells he had stared round rather wildly, biting his lip and trying to get his feet under him to stand and she had seen Scrimgeour's face, watching him, hating and triumphant, and then the Minister had looked straight at her and her tears and a small, complacent, scornful smile had appeared on his lion's face and that, as she could have told him, was terminally stupid of him - because tears in her were almost always a displacement activity while she was thinking about doing something violent, and in flaring rage and darkness she had cried out to him "I'll set a thing on you that will never _tire_!"

And then it had _been_ there, on the astral plane, waiting, grinning, and she had teetered at the edge of some notional cliff and wondered about pulling back from it. And had not done so.

As the car screamed round another bend, Lynsey clutched her head and wondered about the karmic consequences of siccing an undying, tireless fiend made of air and darkness onto the Minister for Magic.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They had ended up at a bizarre, ramshackle house which apparently belonged to the Weasleys: the six of them (Poppy still weeping quietly, and all of them in shock), and several members of the apparently vast Weasley clan, all of them with the same red hair and freckles. One of these walking matches, a gangling, long-nosed youth who bore some physical resemblance to Snape himself, was apparently Harry Potter's best friend Ron. And there was the last one in the trio: a small but determined-looking female with frizzy brown hair.

This girl, Hermione her name was, leaned forward in a businesslike way and said sharply "What you are saying is, they sentenced Professor Snape to solitary confinement for life."

"Worse than that, I'm afraid" said Arthur, resting his elbows on the table and rubbing his face tiredly. "As I understand it, the intention is that he is to be confined to a windowless room, just a - a lighted box, without day or night, and never allowed to see the sky. And nobody - not even the guards - will ever speak to him or look him in the eye or communicate with him in any way, or even acknowledge that they have heard him speak or noticed anything he does, ever again. Muggle children call it being 'sent to Coventry,' for some reason - in this case, until he dies."

As Molly Weasley gasped in shock and clapped her hands over her mouth Hermione nodded sombrely. "I've read about this in _Wizarding Law in the Late Middle Ages: A Study in Scarlet_. It was called 'The Hermitage.' Some prisoners started seeing religious visions which - well, which might or might not have been real. It's hard to tell. Most just went mad."

"Sensory deprivation," Lynsey muttered. She was feeling hot and dizzy and she realized, queasily, that the hammering dread which made her pulse jump in her throat was not her own but her professor's, rigidly controlled but still leaking out along the link she had with him. "Muggles call it sensory deprivation. It can be an aid to meditation - or a form of psychological torture."

"No prizes for guessing which in this case, then," Ron commented with a freckly scowl.

Minerva McGonagall stood up, placed her hands flat on the table and leaned forwards, her square glasses sliding untidily to the end of her pointed nose. "All right," she said grimly: "This means war. We had to sit by and do nothing while Severus was tortured by He Who Must Not Be Named, because we didn't know where he was. Now we do know where he's going to be, to within a hundred yards, and may I be chopped up small and fed to one of Hagrid's questionable pets if I sit by and let the Ministry torture him as well."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Everybody seemed to be full of secrets, and no-one was talking; the fewer people who knew the details of what McGonagall was actually planning, the less chance there was of the Minister working out what they were up to and making some pre-emptive move to stop them, if he were (for example) to cook up an excuse to feed one of them Veritaserum. Lynsey privately suspected that the Minister might have other problems on his mind - occult entities breathing hotly on the back of his neck, and so on - but certainly, the last thing they wanted was for Scrimgeour to get any bright ideas about converting Snape's life sentence to a death sentence.

She did know that Minerva was going on what she called a "fact-finding tour," to gather information which might help her to prepare an appeal on Snape's behalf. And it would have to be on his behalf, not under his instructions, because the terms of his sentence meant that no-one - not even his own legal team - was permitted to communicate with him in any way. But when Lynsey asked the older woman how she was planning to collect information without alerting the Ministry, Minerva only smiled a secret, aggravating smile. "I have my own ways," she said liltingly, "of passing unnoticed."

There was talk about sending someone with the improbable name of Nymphadora Tonks to locate someone apparently called Old Sluggy. Lynsey thought she remembered Snape mentioning him as an expert on faked disappearances, and wondered if they were planning a jail-break, but nobody was telling. Once, she even caught Hermione smiling at a beetle with a thoughtful, inwards smile.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

There was, realistically, nothing Lynsey could do by staying, and the one thing which she could do for Snape - which was to try to support him psychologically _via_ the mental link she had with him - could be done equally as well in St Andrews as in Ottery St Catchpole. And yet to go back to the Muggle world felt like a defeat. Realistically, however, she had already taken over a fortnight off when she should have been working, and if she left it any longer she was going to start missing some serious deadlines. It would do nobody any good if she lost her livelihood; and coding was the one thing which might occupy her mind so completely that whilst she was doing it she could have a break from fretting about the professor.

So she collected the car from Croydon - with a silent prayer of thanks that it hadn't been vandalized, much - and made the long drive back to St Andrews at a much more sedate pace than Arthur Weasley had set. Remus Lupin went with her to put up secure magical wards (his kind of magic; Snape's kind of magic) around her flat, in case the Death Eaters tried to track down the Muggle witch who had helped Snape to make a fool of Voldemort. Blaming him for what nature did, she thought.

Her cats, Starbuck and Nestor, pretended pointedly not to know her but they had no such neutrality towards Lupin - sliding around the walls staring at him with burning eyes. He set the wards, made his excuses and left as soon as he politely could and she, equally polite, did not point out that she knew that tomorrow night was a full moon. And after that, she was on her own. Except for the telephone - at least the Weasleys did have a Muggle telephone, so she wasn't totally cut off from what was going on.

It was two days before the cats stopped sulking and consented to speak to her. She felt guilty about leaving them for so long - but since she had already arranged for them to be fed over that first long weekend of the witch-moot, during which Lucius Malfoy had scooped her up and dumped her into the middle of an alien war, and she had been able to 'phone her neighbours and renew the arrangement on the following Tuesday, they had only missed one or at most two meals over the affair. And if the worst had come to the worst and she had died down there in the dark with Severus, there was a cat-door, so they would at least not have been left trapped and starving.

But it was almost impossible to settle to do any work. On the one hand, although the hand-tailored cruelty of the professor's sentence was nauseating, Minerva seemed confident that she would be able to get him out of it, and do so in a matter of weeks or at worst months, not years. On the other hand, Snape himself didn't know that, and given his chronically low expectations Lynsey knew he was likely to assume he'd been abandoned, and really was stuck in this utterly miserable situation for the rest of what could be a very long life. He could, as she knew from talking to the Weasleys, conceivably live another hundred years or even more and all of it, he would think, in bitter isolation. She could feel him thinking it.

And as far as concentrating on web-design went, it didn't help that Snape's chronic insomnia was catching.

Oh, gods. She tried, she did try, to get a firm grip on his mind, to pool her mental and emotional state with his and then pull him up harder than he pulled her down, as she had done for others before him. But his mind was as slippery as if it had been greased; she could get some basic impressions from him but pushing anything back at him, making any impression on _him_, was well-nigh impossible

She tried to sing for him to keep him sane; to make the music get into his head as it did hers, and change what he was feeling. For Snape, the key-song seemed to be Kipling's _Our Fathers of Old_.

"Excellent herbs had our fathers of old -  
Excellent herbs to ease their pain -  
Alexanders and Marigold,  
Eyebright, Orris, and Elecampane -  
Basil, Rocket, Valerian, Rue,  
(Almost singing themselves they run)  
Vervain, Dittany, Call-me-to-you -  
Cowslip, Melilot, Rose of the Sun.  
Anything green that grew out of the mould  
Was an excellent herb to our fathers of old.

"Wonderful tales had our fathers of old,  
Wonderful tales of the herbs and the stars -  
The Sun was Lord of the Marigold,  
Basil and Rocket belonged to Mars.  
Pat as a sum in division it goes -  
(Every herb had a planet bespoke) -  
Who but Venus should govern the Rose?  
Who but Jupiter own the Oak?  
Simply and gravely the facts they are told  
In the wonderful books of our fathers of old."

(in magic, of course, both his'n'hers, they _were_ facts)

"Wonderful little, when all is said,  
Wonderful little our fathers knew.  
Half of their remedies cured you dead -  
And most of their teaching was quite untrue -  
'Look at the stars when a patient is ill.  
(But dirt has nothing to do with disease),  
Bleed and blister as much as you will,  
Blister and bleed him as oft' as you please.'  
Whence enormous and manifold  
Errors were made by our fathers of old.

"Yet when the sickness was sore in the land,  
And neither planets nor herbs assuaged,  
They took their lives in their lancet-hand  
And, oh, what a wonderful war they waged!  
Yes, when the crosses were chalked on the door -  
(Yes, when the terrible dead-cart rolled!)  
Excellent courage our fathers bore -  
Excellent heart had our fathers of old.  
None too learned, but nobly bold  
And into the fight went our fathers of old.

"Now if it be certain, as Galen says -  
And the sage Hippocrates holds as much -  
'That those afflicted by doubts and dismays  
Are mightily helped by a dead man's touch,'  
Then, be good to us, stars above!  
Then, be good to us, herbs below!  
We are afflicted by what we can prove,  
And we are distracted by what we know.  
So-ah, so!  
Down from your heaven or up from your mould  
Please send us the hearts of our fathers of old!"

Even when she couldn't get a proper fix on him she could feel the long list of herbs and the appeal to an ancient courage soothing him, and she sang it over and over under her breath, round and round, but even she had to take a rest some time; and if she relaxed her grip for a moment she could feel his heart-choking misery beginning to flood back.

The few times she actually managed to concentrate on coding it did actually help. That detached, scholarly concentration as she tried to thrash out a knotty problem in a Cascading Style Sheet was a state of mind he recognized: one that felt like home as nothing else, perhaps, had ever done. Sometimes, she was sure, she could feel him occupying his mind with some equally knotty problem in potions - "Geeks of the world, unite," she thought, wryly - but that small sweet rush of fierce triumph when he found an answer was immediately bitter and fed back into a horrible, resigned despair, because no-one else would ever know. He could solve all the problems of the universe, and they would be no use because he could tell nobody: not even the prison's house-elves were permitted to speak to him or to acknowledge that they had heard him.

Ordinarily, if she was "picking up" empathically on someone else it was easy to tell which were their emotions and which were hers. Ordinarily it was, she thought, like linking two video players which were tuned to different channels - that moment when you had plugged in the audio cable but not the video, or _vice versa_, and for a moment the sound-track on the slaved machine did not match the picture. You could feel that the other person's emotions were on another channel, totally divorced from what was going on in your own life. But in this case, she was so anxious and unhappy _about_ Snape that it was difficult to distinguish his misery from hers. And that was bad: if she was to have any chance of pulling him up out of his own unhappiness she had to maintain herself in a state of fierce, almost manic joy. However bad he felt, and she felt, if she was to help him at all she had to be able to sing herself up.

"...Yes, when the crosses were chalked on the door -  
(Yes, when the terrible dead-cart rolled!)  
Excellent courage our fathers bore -  
Excellent heart had our fathers of old.  
None too learned, but nobly bold  
And into the fight went our fathers of old..."

At night, sometimes, she dreamed his dreams. She was sure they were his dreams - she herself seldom dreamed at all and in any case they felt slightly foreign, like a shoe worn into the shape of someone else's foot. Sometimes he dreamed about things she was sure had really happened, although they had acquired a surreal intensity - about a woman, falling, her face impersonal ivory and her hair a flame; about faceless guards who would never look at him, even when he provoked them into hitting him. Literally faceless, when he dreamed them. But what was far worse was the recurring dream of himself as an old man, white-haired, babbling and mad, and the guards not relenting even as he lay dying - begging for somebody, anybody to speak to him or even look at him. Night after night in his dreams and in hers he died like that, still alone.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Lynsey had hoped Snape would adjust, that he would settle down; that she would be able to make a stronger link to anchor him with. Instead, he seemed to be getting worse. The cell, she knew from Arthur, was lit round the clock, and even the food didn't vary - breakfast was indistinguishable from lunch, and all meals arrived at irregular intervals. This was both a tailor-made part of his sentence, designed so that he would lose even the intellectual knowledge of the course of the sun, and a deliberate bit of brainwashing. He was, as she could well believe, a powerful wizard and capable of doing a certain amount of magic even without a wand, and as such even the wards on the walls of Azkaban might not be enough to hold him. In the absence of the Dementors, then, other methods had to be used to keep the prisoners too dizzy and disoriented to escape, and the place was threaded through with spells to induce feelings of depression and helplessness.

It was, it must be, all too horribly like being back in the blank whiteness of Voldemort's torture-chamber, and the thought of him being jailed and slapped around by his own people when he was still only two weeks out from that horror turned her stomach. And the Ministry were stone-walling on the subject of an appeal, Arthur had told her, although he assured her that Minerva still seemed cheerfully confident. When he had asked her why, apparently, she had smiled mysteriously and told him it was better that he did not know.

Arthur told her bluntly that Severus was actually far safer in solitary confinement than he would have been if he had been allowed to mingle with the other prisoners - since most of them were Death Eaters. Real ones, too, not fake play-pretend ones with alternative agendas, like Snape himself. He'd be fortunate if they only cut his throat, and any messages he received from that source could only be threats. Scrimgeour's special malice towards him had probably saved his life, but it didn't feel to Lynsey as if he would be very thankful. He was not, she thought, quite ready yet to kill himself, because some rational part of his mind did know that Minerva at least might get him out. He did expect that she would at least try - but he didn't seem to expect her to try very hard, or to succeed if she did.

Lynsey shuddered, feeling her friend's own expectation of the future seep through her like a creeping disease - the long years stretching ahead in an endless grey nothingness of isolation and scorn. Swearing in an undertone, she abandoned all pretence at work and sang to him fiercely under her breath, rocking back and forth in front of the computer and feeling sick and dizzy.

"...Basil, Rocket, Valerian, Rue,  
(Almost singing themselves they run)  
Vervain, Dittany, Call-me-to-you -  
Cowslip, Melilot, Rose of the Sun..."

But nothing made any difference, she could feel his mind sliding into free-fall, and further - starting to flash on the memories of what Lucius and Macnair had done to him, all on his own in the blinding white light, until she bit her own tongue in vicarious panic and scrabbled frantically after the music -

"Halfway round the track up spoke the noble rider:  
'I fear we must fall back for she's going like a tiger.'  
Up spoke the noble horse, 'Ride on my noble master  
For we're halfway round the track and it's now we'll see who's faster'."

The defiant energy in that seemed to drag him back from the awful precipice of memory, this once if not in general, but he felt to her to have given up fighting. She might have expected him to be more resilient, on previous showing, but he was desperately tired, still ill and traumatized and dragged down by the demands he had made on his own future energy while escaping Voldemort, and he had, in his own mind, no hope at all.

Lynsey could see his point, that was the worst of it. Even if the mysterious and devious Albus Dumbledore really was alive and came forward, if he admitted publicly that Snape had deliberately held back from killing him then Bellatrix Lestrange, the Bonder, would know that Snape had broken his Unbreakable Vow, and he would be a dead man in that moment. Or if Dumbledore confirmed the lie that Snape had told the court, and smiled in his beard before all the world, saying: "He sincerely tried to kill me, on my orders, but he failed," that would get Severus out of jail all right, but he'd be right back with the "Kill Dumbledore or die" of the Vow hanging over his head. Any long-term chance of liberty he had depended, it seemed, not only on Albus Dumbledore being alive but on Bellatrix Lestrange not being: and given the number and quality of enemies the woman had acquired in her colourful career, she was plainly very hard to kill.

And if Dumbledore had died, which given his condition when last seen was quite likely... Azkaban. Forever. Her professor, she could sense, saw nothing ahead of himself but decades of being treated as a mindless object, if Voldemort lost the war, or being hoicked out for more torture if he won. He knew that he would lose his mind sooner or later and he seemed to think that it would be better that it be sooner, because if he was mad he might not mind it all so much.

As Lynsey scrabbled, and shoved, and sang herself hoarse, trying to hold back the crushing tide of memory, she thought irritably that probably only Severus could make a perfectly rational, cold-blooded decision to go barmy.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Twelve days after Snape's trial, and ten days after Lynsey's return to St Andrews, Lupin came to check up on her, bringing Harry with him. "I thought it must be pretty miserable for you," he said apologetically, "being - well, 'out of the loop,' so to speak. Not that the rest of us are exactly in it - Minerva is being nearly as secretive as Dumbledore always was."

"'Mione too," Harry said cheerfully around a mouthful of battered haddock. "I'm pretty sure she's up to something, but she won't tell."

They were sitting, all three of them, in a row on the edge of the high wall which ringed the harbour, eating fish and chips out of greasy paper, with a six foot drop down to the walkway under their feet and nothing at their backs but a much longer drop, straight and sheer down to a grey sea in which there was, as Lynsey happened to know, an impressive collection of boulders like so many jagged teeth.

As they talked Lynsey suddenly flinched and jerked her head aside, baring her teeth as she tried to fight the sudden rush of nausea and despair.

"What is it?" Lupin asked sharply.

"Told you - told you I could read him," she said, her teeth chattering.

"That bad?"

"Worse. It's..." She drew a deep breath as the jolt of misery receded a little. "You know the expression 'Nine Days' Wonder'? Because he does, and that's what he's thinking - that he was allowed to have friendship and a little warmth and fun for nine whole days, from Saturday through to Sunday week, and now that's got to last him for the rest of his life. And it's - worse because of it. To have seen what he could have, to have seen _that_ he could have friendship and warmth and then to have it whipped away again, that's far, far worse than never having had it at all.

"I'm doing all I can to raise his mental state but I get the impression he more than half thinks he's only imagining me - that he is alone, that I'm just a phantom he's tormenting himself with to remind himself just how very alone he is. Even with me pulling against him with everything I've got, he feels - dreadful, but sort of accepting dreadful, which is possibly worse. Like - oh, gods, for a moment there it looked to him as if he could have friends, company, and now it's just him again, alone, getting slapped around and spat at and that's - that's almost comfortable, in a ghastly way, because that's the way his life has always been. It's like - he's almost amused, very horribly amused - jeering at himself for having dared to think things could ever be any different because _those are the rules_, as they apply to him, and those are the Ministry's rules - that he should suffer and be scorned and be alone. And he's - sort of sinking into that - and it hurts worse because he'd been fool enough to think things could ever be any different."

Lupin sat perched on the edge of the wall in his shabby robes, swinging his legs like a little boy, gazing down at the boats in the harbour and wearing a hooded, inward expression. "I realize he wouldn't thank me for saying this," he said slowly, "because the Marauders are still a very sore point with him: but if there was one thing I learned from James and Sirius it was that rules are for the birds. There's always a way to cheat, if you look for it."

"Lateral thinking?" Lynsey said in a bright, brittle tone, fighting to maintain an "up" against the waves of vicarious misery which threatened to drown her. ((_"Excellent herbs had our fathers of old - // Excellent herbs to ease their pain - "_))

"Call it - creative use of the available resources. To start with, we need to define the problem."

"Severus is in bloody Azkaban, what do you think the bloody problem is?" ((_"Alexanders and Marigold// Eyebright, Orris, and Elecampane - "_))

"That, however, isn't our problem, at least at present - it's Minerva's, and she has it well in hand, according to her. Whilst it might be _possible_ to break Severus out of there, I suggest that it is not desirable for us to get excessively creative unless and until Minerva has clearly failed or his life is endangered."

Lynsey's mind stuttered a little over the concept of a werewolf getting excessively creative. "Yeah - I agree, I have to say. Far better he should be released legally, than that he should escape and then become a fugitive for the rest of his bloody life. But, oh, gods, he feels so bad..."

"The problem, then," said Harry, "is simply to stop him from cracking up while Professor McGonagall does her stuff. It's funny - I never thought of him as the type to crack up before, but now that I've started seeing him as - fragile, I can't see him as anything else."

"He's not fragile, not really - he's been through stuff that would have left most people mad or hopelessly corrupted years ago. If we do nothing at all, I'm sure he will still walk out of there reasonably sane, however long it takes - but he's suffering miserably, and the fact that he's so used to it that he can carry it and keep going doesn't make it less painful. It's especially bad, and especially bloody unjust, because he wasn't allowed any time to recover from being tortured or even, properly, from pneumonia, and now _this_."

"Mmm," said Lupin, swinging his heels. "So what we're looking at isn't getting him out, it's getting us in, isn't it? - getting something in to him, anyway, even just a message, so he can know he's not been abandoned. And I don't think getting one of us arrested would really cut it, somehow."

"So, what we need is - "

"Dobby," Harry said with a sharp grin. "Dobby is an amazingly available resource, and house-elves can go anywhere."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Programmer's mindset: on the day that I learned that the man I was desperately in love with had just died of a heart-attack, totally unexpectedly, I was writing a program to deadline. Readers, I sat down and I finished that program and _then_ I cracked up. Every programmer I've told this story to understands completely.

_Our Fathers of Old_: poem from Rudyard Kipling's children's book _Rewards and Fairies_, with minor alterations to make it more singable - from the singing of Peter Bellamy.

"Halfway round the track up spoke the noble rider:" from the traditional song _Skewbald_, about an American horse who quite unexpectedly beat all comers at an Irish race-track in 1847.

Minor edits have been made to bring this chapter in line with the new _Deathly Hallows_ backstory. Snape's potential lifespan has been edited downwards from "easily" a hundred and thirty-eight-plus or more, to "conceivably" a hundred and thirty-eight, in the light of the revelation that Albus was between a hundred and fifteen and a hundred and twenty when he died, not a hundred and fifty as Rowling had previously stated in interviews (although she has implied that Aberforth will still be going strong in his mid hundred-and-thirties). Lily's death has been added into Snape's recurrent nightmares, since we now know how overwhelmingly important she was to him.


	4. 03 Unchartered Waters

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**3: UNCHARTERED WATERS**  
((_In which vessels are for hire - at a price._)) 

Of course, it wasn't as simple as that - but then what was? House-elves, it seemed, although they were resistant to all forms of wizarding magic and could pass through anti-Apparition wards as if they were so much smoke, were bound by their own much older magics. Unless directly summoned by their master, they could not Apparate more than the traditional seven leagues at a time - in fact Lynsey suspected that the Seven-League Boots of beloved folk memory had been based on house-elf magic. Hopping across country in lots of twenty-one miles at a time was fine when it _was_ across country; but Azkaban, she gathered, was on the far side of about a hundred and fifty miles of very cold water.

"We're going to need a boat, aren't we?" Lupin said, looking at the little vessels bobbing in the harbour.

"Short of commandeering an oil-rig - that's a sort of artificial metal island used for extracting oil from under the sea-bed, right? - then, yeah. And I don't know if there even are any oil-rigs in that area." ((_"Who but Venus should govern the Rose// Who but Jupiter own the Oak?"_))

"That's another thing," Harry said glumly. "In _what_ area? Azkaban's Unplottable, isn't it?"

"Not to a house-elf. If we can get within twenty-one miles of the place, Dobby can go there. So we only need a very rough idea where it is - and Dobby may be able to help, even there."

"_I_ can help," Lynsey said, grimacing. ((_"Half of their remedies cured you dead - // And most of their teaching was quite untrue -"_)) "I told you I can feel the professor: I ought to be able to get some sort of directional fix on him - while he's busy scrambling my brains."

"That'll help," said Lupin. "All right, people - where are we going to get a boat? I mean, I suppose we could nick one - but I think we're going to need something a bit more substantial than one of these, and I don't know how to sail it once we've got it. Do you?"

"No - but I can ask my Dad. He's bound still to have the contacts - he used to work for MacBrayne's, and you know what they say, don't you?"

"No."

"The earth and sea it is the Lord's,  
And all that it contains,  
Excepting for the Western Isles -  
And they are all MacBrayne's."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Almost the hardest part was having to lie to her father about why she wanted to charter an ocean-going fishing-boat in the first place. Lupin, it seemed, dabbled in water-colours, when he could afford the materials, which was enough to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative; so she told him that she had a friend who wanted a platform from which to paint seascapes.

The actual hardest part was finding a crew who weren't all Wee Frees, and weren't too superstitious to ship with a woman. They couldn't just supply their own crew - even with magic to assist them, an ocean-going boat was just too complex and dangerous a prospect for the unskilled, and it wouldn't even be legal to take the thing out without a skipper with a proper skipper's ticket - yachtmaster, deep sea, coastal or fishing.

"We're going to need a skipper, two deckhands and an engineer, minimum - oh and a ship's cook, unless we do it ourselves."

"I think we can supply our own cook. What's this going to cost - and how are we going to pay for it? I mean - I'd pay for it myself if I could, but..." He gestured eloquently at his threadbare robes. "I'm probably the only wizard around who's more broke than Severus himself."

"Well - the cheapest thing we can hire that's big and stable enough to go the distance seems to be a diesel-powered forty-foot motor fishing vessel, according to Dad - and that's going to set us back about a thousand a week. Plus wages for four crewmen - at a guess, at least a thousand a month each."

"So basically that's going to be - uh - about two thousand... what, pounds? per week. What's that in real money?"

"About seven hundred galleons," said Harry gloomily. "It's going to be me, isn't it? Since I seem to be the only person who's actually got any money."

"I can put up about five hundred pounds," Lynsey muttered, too embarrassed to admit she had already spent nearly sixty pounds on a pair of tickets to a Runrig concert in Stirling in March, on the sound magical grounds that a practical expression of confidence in Snape's early release would make it more likely to happen. "And the same again in about six weeks when I get paid for the website I'm working on at the moment. Assuming I get it finished, with all this going on. So if you could pay for it for the moment..."

"I'm going to have to, aren't I? I mean, I suppose we can't just leave the bad-tempered old sod stuck there, can we, especially since..."

"Especially since he's been in there before," Lupin concluded grimly. "When he first... when he first came over to our side Mad-Eye didn't believe him and he was locked up for several weeks until Dumbledore could get him out. At least... well, at least this time around there aren't any Dementors but the place has got to have horrible associations, quite apart from..."

"Quite apart from the Minister doing his bloody best to drive him round the bend," said Lynsey, pulling a face.

"I think I preferred him as an enemy," said Harry. "It was a lot cheaper."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Dobby presented an unexpected complication. He was willing, even eager, to do whatever he could to help "poor Master Severus," but when he realized that infiltrating Azkaban would involve dressing in a pillow-slip like a regular, enslaved house-elf he had a fit of the vapours. In the end Molly Weasley ran him up a special shirt which looked like a pillow-slip but which was really a real, proper garment made especially for him, and that apparently was acceptable to his pride.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the end, they got their crew. One of the deckhands was a Goth, complete with full black and white makeup, who'd been thrown off a trawler for brawling, and the skipper was well past his sell-by date - but he had his deep sea ticket all right and beggars couldn't be choosers, especially when time was of the essence. Which it was, really, because they didn't want to leave Snape in such a psychologically horrible trap any longer than they could help.

Now that they were actually doing something Lynsey felt less frustrated and it was easier to maintain a good fighting high; but even so, trying to shift her professor's mood was like trying to move a loaded cart with the brakes on. He felt to her to be not only crushingly, clawingly depressed but weak and ill and bitterly cold and she wondered whether, if he were to suffer a relapse into pneumonia, the prison would even bother to treat him. Lupin said harshly that they probably would, if only to prevent him from finding too easy an escape, but she was not much reassured. She was left alternately cursing and cajoling - "Come along darling you silly bastard" - trying to ground him psychically through a nightmare switchback of real and remembered horrors. His increasing disorientation made her dizzy, and his unquenchable misery ached in all her joints like rheumatism.

And she felt hellishly guilty about the cats - but it would cost a fortune to put them in a cattery and she probably ought to give whatever spare money she had to Harry, to help with what she thought of as the campaign fund. It wouldn't necessarily be any better for them than leaving them for the neighbours to feed, in any case. She salved her conscience by buying the neighbours a bottle of fairly good malt whisky as a thank-you (or a bribe, depending on how you looked at it), and hoped that Starbuck and Nestor wouldn't have turned completely wild by the time she got back.

At least, the engine on the boat apparently generated enough spare electrical power to run any gadget you liked, within reason, so she would be able to take the laptop and the mobile 'phone and get some work done. As an afterthought, she packed a few of her tools, and a nice piece of sycamore, and a hank of silver wire - feeling that it would be good magic, and lucky, to begin working on a wand for the professor.

In addition to the four-man crew there was herself, to act as a pathfinder. There was Lupin, ostensibly as a painter of seascapes which, he said, gave a whole new meaning to the term "water-colour" - but in fact there mainly to fiddle with the crew's memory in case they caught sight of anything disturbing: Dobby, for example. There was Dobby himself, bobbing and grinning. And there was a bun-faced, vague-looking boy called Neville who was apparently very good with weather charms, and a halfway passable cook.

Harry, although he was paying for most of it, was to remain on land and act as courier, ferrying messages of both sorts by broom while Lupin provided the crew with vague, half-forgotten helicopter-shaped thoughts to explain the sudden appearance of extra food on board, should they stay out long enough to need it.

And they were off - setting sail (if that was the right word for a motor-driven vessel) from a little Northumberland harbour-town called Seahouses, just south of Bamburgh. The sea was high and choppy and the day had a flat bright greyness to it, like polished steel: but Lynsey had a strong stomach, and the taste of salt in her mouth was a promise that her professor's grinding unhappiness would soon find an antidote. Or at least a counter-irritant: she was already finding Dobby's eager-beaver bounciness a bit hard on the nerves.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They kept themselves to themselves and didn't mingle, much, except for meals on the mess deck; even putting a curtain up to divide the forecastle, which had enough bunks to sleep twelve at a pinch, in addition to the separate cabin for the skipper. It went against the grain to appear so standoffish; but the less the crew saw of them the less likely they were to notice anything odd (like Dobby) and need to have their minds adjusted.

Not that Dobby was necessarily much odder than the Goth deckhand, who had a habit of wandering about the deck gibbering slightly and doing bird-calls. Lynsey wasn't sure whether he was crazy or just liked to freak people out.

Trying to get a fix on the professor was like smelling the wind with her mind. Ordinarily, psychic contact was directionless and distanceless, but if she willed it to have direction then she could feel the fierce ache of him waxing and waning as she turned her head. After that, it was (apparently) a fairly simple matter for Neville to tweak the weather so that going in the direction they wanted to go would seem like a rational decision to the crew.

They slept overnight in the rolling darkness of the forecastle, where Lynsey clung half-awake to the edge of her bunk, sick and restless not with the motion of the sea but with the dizzying waves of emotion which were not hers but Snape's, singing to him in her head, softly but with force: _"I will keep, I will keep // My watch on the deep // 'Gainst the reef and the tempest howling."_ Lupin sprawled across the bunk half on his back and half on his side with his arm flung out, looking like an ageing version of _The Death of Chatterton_; Neville curled up in the foetal position and snored; and Dobby slept in a locker full of clothes and pretended not to be there.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the morning, Dobby tested the world with one of his extra senses, turning his head slowly from side to side and sniffing with his long nose. "Azkaban is near, oh yes" he muttered. "Dobby can smell it."

"What does it smell like, Dobby?" Neville asked, intrigued.

"Pain," he replied, baring his sharp little teeth, and disappeared with a _crack_.

They waited anxiously for over an hour, although it felt like eternity - suppose Dobby was discovered the instant he arrived? Could a house-elf be captured in any meaningful sense? Would he be able to return safely to what was, despite Neville's best efforts, still a moving vessel? Lupin got out his paints and his sketchbook, in order to look the part, but was far too tense to do any actual art.

They were all vastly relieved, therefore, when the sound of Neville clattering saucepans in the galley told them that he was covering up for the gunshot-snap of Dobby's return.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Not found Master Severus yet, but Dobby finds out about prison, Dobby does. Whole prison is warded against Apparition by humans, and against Portkeys, but is a landing-stage in front of gates where boats tie up, and Portkeys work there. Bring prisoners in that way.

"Prisoners in windowless punishment cells, like where Master Severus is, lie very deep in fortress. House-elves forbidden to speak to them. Dobby is sorry to say the guards hate Master Severus, say he killed great Headmaster Dumbledore - spit in his food or worse so he won't eat, and then make him eat it, just enough to stay alive."

Lynsey felt queasy with sympathy, but Lupin, who had a dog's lack of squeamishness, simply asked, "How do you know this, Dobby?"

The little figure shrugged. "Dobby asks prison elves. Got to go back in one hour, speak to shift coming up from punishment cells, find out which cell Master Severus is in."

"But - " Lupin sounded out of his depth and bewildered for the first time since they had started this private little war. "Won't they - give you away? Betray you to the guards?"

Dobby shrugged again. "House-elves at Azkaban always told, watch out for strange witches and wizards and report it; watch out for prisoners escaping and report it; don't speak to prisoners; don't help prisoners; don't give clean food to prisoners. Not told to watch out for strange house-elves."

"But - they must realize that their - their masters would want to know about a strange house-elf coming in asking about a high-security prisoner?"

For the third time, Dobby shrugged. "Not told to say."

Lynsey began to grin; an incredulous, spreading grin. "It's called a work-to-rule - if you don't like the orders you're being given, or the way your bosses treat you, you can cause incredible trouble by doing exactly and _only_ what the rules say. That's right, isn't it Dobby?"

"Miss Muggle Miss understands - house-elves don't like being in a place where humans are being hurt, and being told not to help them. Can't disobey direct orders - but implied orders are... optional."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The second time, he was back much faster. It was perhaps a good job that Neville was naturally rather clumsy, so no-one in the crew would think there was anything odd about his constantly clattering the pans.

"Dobby knows where Master Severus is now - Master Severus is in cell nineteen on the second punishment corridor. Guards check on Master Severus about every fifteen minutes but Dobby can be in and out of Master Severus's cell in two shakes."

"What will you do about the noise, though, Dobby?" Lupin asked. "Won't the guards notice if you keep arriving with a bang?"

"Have to take a chance on first time; house-elves often check on prisoners to stop them killing themselves. After that, Dobby thought, borrow Master Remus's wand, take it to Master Severus so Master Severus can set a silencing charm on a corner of the cell. Then Dobby can come and go quietly."

"Er - yes, all right, that should work. But don't lose it or anything, will you Dobby? Only, if you did we'd only have Neville's wand left between us!"

"Dobby would never lose Master Remus's wand!"

They made up a small tray of items for Dobby to take through for this momentous first visit, on which he would be appearing as a very small and peculiar ministering angel. Any food or drink had to be something which could be seen off and tidied up after inside fifteen minutes, and which didn't have a strong smell. A substantial cheese and pickle sandwich - that was obvious - and Lynsey remembered what Snape had said to her when they were running for their lives underground, and added a mug of heavily sweetened black coffee. Lupin protested that coffee would leave a strong smell which might alert the guards, but Lynsey pointed out that it was only Maxwell House, and barely even tasted like coffee, let alone smelled like it.

Lupin's wand - accompanied by a certain amount of muttering. "Just - make sure he knows we're going to get him out of there, OK Dobby? If he hangs on to it and tries to break out on his own, he'll get himself killed."

A pen and a notepad. Lynsey had thought ahead and bought a couple of those felt-pens with brush-shaped nibs; less messy (and expensive!) than a fountain-pen, but less of a culture-shock than a biro, to someone who was accustomed to use a quill.

And finally, of course, the _piece de resistance_ - two very expensive tickets to a Runrig concert, and a note which read: "This for your birthday - Minerva assures me that it isn't a bad investment, and that she fully expects to have you out of there in time to attend." As an afterthought, Lynsey grinned suddenly and signed it "Blondel." A bit theatrical, perhaps; but then, he was nothing if not theatrical himself.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Caledonian-MacBrayne's, or Cal-Mac, is a ferry company which has been publicly-owned since 1948. It has been a major carrier of passengers and freight from the mainland of Scotland to and from the Hebrides since the 1870s, and has enjoyed a virtual monopoly since the 1970s.

The comment about lending artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative is a quote from Gilbert and Sullivan's light opera _The Mikado_.

Wee Frees are members of the Free Church of Scotland, a small, hard-line Protestant sect whose main activities are the singing of very strange and beautiful Gaelic hymns, and schisming into ever-smaller splinter groups and fighting each other. Wee Frees do not work on Sundays and they would be horrified at even a sniff of witchcraft.

In Scotland "messages" means your regular household shopping, as well as the transfer of information.

The Goth deckhand is based closely on a guy I actually know.

"I will keep, I will keep // My watch on the deep" - chorus of the song _The Night Watch_, by Andrew Hennessey, arranged by Jim Blain, from the album _Something Old Something New_ by the Scottish folk band Cauther Fair.

According to legend, when Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned at a secret location his minstrel Blondel travelled across Europe, from fortress to fortress, singing under the castle walls until finally he heard his master's voice join in with him from within the prison. At the end of _Mood Music_ Lynsey promised Snape that if he was sentenced to Azkaban she would "...come and serenade you through the bars, in the manner of Blondel."


	5. 04 Talking Back

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**N.B.** This chapter hasn't been beta'd by anyone except me, since two of my betas are away visiting their families and the third has had her ISP struck by lightning (really), so there may be minor changes made at a later date.

* * *

**4: TALKING BACK**  
((_In which notes are passed in class._)) 

Later, they were able to reconstruct the moment from Dobby's account - how he snapped from nothingness into solid reality, bearing coffee, to find Lynsey's professor curled up miserable and freezing and destroyed with loneliness on his thin, damp prison-issue mattress, wobbly with hunger and cold and exhaustion and chained to the bed by one wrist. At the time, all that Lynsey knew was a great jolt of vicarious emotion which knocked her dizzy, as Snape surged in that one incredulous moment from aching misery to a sort of violent, wrenching relief.

She was still giddy and gasping, clutching the edge of the galley counter to hold herself steady, when there was a hard _bang_ and Dobby was back with them, grinning and bobbing anxiously. Shaking her head to clear the sudden ringing in her ears, she heard Lupin say "... my bloody wand, I _told_ you he'd want to keep it."

Dobby bobbed again, unhappily. "Master Severus is not sure Dobby is real. Not believe Dobby when Dobby say help is at hand."

He held out the notebook, on which was scrawled faintly in a shaky, disjointed-looking hand, "Dobby says Lupin, Longbottom, O'Connor - boat - not a dream?" There was a brown smear of pickle across the paper, where Snape had dropped part of the sandwich in his shaking eagerness for clean food.

Lupin took one of the brush-pens, flipped the pad to the next page and wrote "Not a dream. According to Dobby we're lying about eighteen miles south-west of Azkaban. Don't worry: Minerva has some private scheme on the go and she's sure she can get your sentence over-turned in a matter of weeks. But you must send me my wand back - if you try to keep it you'll blow the gaff. Lupin." Then, as an afterthought, "How are you?"

A bang, a crack, and Dobby was back almost before he had left, bearing Lupin's wand and a note which said simply: "Starving."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Lynsey might not be able to get much in the way of complex information through her mental link with the professor, but she could feel enough to get a sort of yes/no, positive/negative switch which told her whether it was safe for Dobby to go through. The first priority was food, for according to Dobby that one-word comment "Starving" was not an exaggeration or a euphemism but literal truth.

The house-elf flitted back and forth eagerly, taking small amounts of food and clean water a mouthful or two at a time, so Snape could be sure of having eaten everything before any guards showed up. When he was brought prison food, Dobby carried the bowl through to the boat and emptied it overboard - for even what wasn't deliberately fouled was inedibly bland and stale - and then took it back filled with whatever they could find on the boat; anything from Alphabetti Spaghetti to fresh-caught mackerel. Within only a day Snape's writing on the notes started to look a little less wobbly, and within two days Dobby was pleased to report that the guards no longer forced him to eat contaminated food - since they were under the impression that hunger had broken his will and he was now submissively eating whatever they chose to give him.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

SS to L O'C: "Thought I would never see a friendly face again."

L O'C to SS: "And then you did and it was Dobby..."

SS to L O'C: "Just now, believe me, Dobby looks like the Archangel Gabriel - bug eyes, pillowcase and all."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

At least Lynsey no longer felt overwhelmed and suffocated by Snape's misery and her own sorrow for him, although his emotional state still felt fragile and strained - choked with relief, now, and with wonder, instead of pain. But she knew he was starting to hit his stride again when she received a scribbled but much firmer note which said:

SS to L O'C: "Did I dream this, or did you really curse strutting bastard Scrimgeour?"

L O'C to SS: "Yup."

SS to L O'C: "Do I want to know what with?"

L O'C to SS: "With a deep and horrible curse which should follow him to the ends of the earth, even on Tuesdays."

SS to L O'C: "And it couldn't happen to a more deserving fellow. Have to ask - why Tuesdays?"

L O'C to SS: "Why not?"

Now that Snape was sounding slightly more like himself - which was to say, brisk and bitchy - Remus Lupin settled down and began to paint in some earnest, in order to give weight to his alibi for being out here. He was, actually, quite good - especially his sweeping scenes of the sea by moonlight, with a path of silver dancing over dark water.

Over the course of only a few days they arrived at a kind of routine domesticity. Neville mainly stayed in the galley, talking to members of the crew - or to Dobby, who had taken to lurking in a kitchen cupboard with the door half shut, when he wasn't acting as a benign courier. Lupin had his paints, and Lynsey worked on the laptop for several hours a day, inside the forecastle or the galley where the salt air couldn't get at it, and then sat on deck if it was fine and whittled away at the length of sycamore she was turning into a wand for Severus. He, she thought, both felt and sounded a lot calmer; Azkaban was still a horror to him and her breath still shuddered in her chest when she let her mind run with his, but she thought that he could endure indefinitely, just so long as every day included some sort of pleasant occurrence, some little kindness, instead of being endless dreary isolation and scorn. Even if he really came to be imprisoned for life, he could live with that and stay sane, provided every day included a little conversation and a little kindness.

Lupin had brought an Order tool, a mirror spelled to act as a two-way communicator between specific persons, and with it he was able to talk to Harry and tell him what was needed. They were inside the exclusion zone which prevented humans from Apparating to or from Azkaban, but on a calm night under cover of darkness Harry and Ron flew them out more food, which they pretended to the crew had been in their lockers all along. It included flour for baking, and Neville - who was a passable cook - came to the happy realization that you could put pretty-much anything into a Cornish pasty crust (curry, haggis, cauliflower cheese, prawn cocktail, anything) and it could be eaten in a couple of minutes without leaving a mess. And the news from home was as welcome as the food.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

SS to RL: "Any idea how long I'm to be stuck in this putrid apology for a municipal latrine?"

RL to SS: "Minerva says to tell you that a cat may look at a queen and that this is just as well because the Ministry seems to be full of them - whatever that means. Please don't worry. We'd prefer to get you out of there legally if we can, but if Minerva's little scheme fails we have several other options - one of which involves Peeves, and two of which involve high explosives. None of them involves leaving you in there for longer than a few months."

SS to RL: "Appealing though the idea is in many ways, you probably shouldn't actually blow up Azkaban if you can avoid it - the shockwave would bring the Ministry down with it."

L O'C to SS: "And this would be bad how, precisely?"

"I don't know..." said Lynsey thoughtfully, looking at this correspondence. "'Queen' is a slangy, old-fashioned expression for an effeminate homosexual. I don't know how it is with your lot but these days, for - for Muggles that's no big deal, even in government. Unless, of course, the guy has a wife who thinks he's straight... But why a cat?"

"Oh, that part's easy" Neville said dismissively, without taking his eyes off the pan he was scouring. "Everybody knows Professor McGonagall can turn into a cat."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

RL to SS: "We think Minerva may be using her cat form to collect information about Ministry officials' sex-lives, with a view to blackmail."

SS to RL: "Good - I'm sure it's a fertile field for research."

RL to SS: "I thought you'd be more surprised."

SS to RL: "I worked with Minerva for 16 years: nothing she does would surprise me."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

RL to SS: "This is just like passing notes in class behind the teacher's back, isn't it?"

SS to RL: "I wouldn't bloody know, would I? Unlike you, I never had any bloody friends to write to - the only notes I ever got in class were insults from your bloody lot suggesting what I should go and do with myself."

RL to SS: "Sorry - I didn't mean to distress you."

SS to RL: "Bad dog!"

RL to SS: "Woof."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The sea was as hard and bright and glittering as a bowlful of broken glass and the deck heaved and swung under their feet. Neville and Lupin both looked decidedly green but Lynsey found the pitching motion and the salt-spray exhilarating. As she swayed her way up the deck, clinging to the rail, her heart swelled with a fierce joy and she thought that it was a shared one. Azkaban might be the pit of Hell in many ways; her professor might still be trapped and freezing, chained to a nasty little rusting iron bed in a blinding white box and pinned down by spells designed to break his magic and his mind; but the spiteful pleasure of knowing that he was putting one over on the guards, and the much greater and less petty pleasure of having friends to play a game on the guards _with_, were so strong that his mood had apparently swung right round from misery to one of his reckless highs, until she felt positively drunk with it.

And they could do something about the "freezing" aspect, couldn't they? That afternoon, Lupin had Dobby fetch Snape's thin, measly little blanket through to the boat where Neville - who insisted that it should be he that did it - charmed it to be always warm and dry. Dobby whisked it back again before the guards reappeared, and that was that: a simple little spell, and suddenly Azkaban became almost bearable. Suddenly he could sleep, her professor, and not be woken fifteen times in a night by bitter cold and discomfort; and she no longer had to worry too much that he would have a relapse into pneumonia.

When they praised him, nervy, plump little Neville smiled a quick, there and gone smile which reminded Lynsey of Snape himself, and tucked his chin down in embarrassment. "I'm just glad I could help him, is all."

Remus Lupin looked at him curiously. "I haven't asked you this before, but - it really is very good of you to do this - I mean, not just the blanket, but coming out on the boat at all - to do this for Severus, considering that you and he..."

"Considering that he's an evil-tempered bastard and he scares the shit out of me?"

"Well, yes. Basically."

Neville sighed and pulled a face which made him look like a puzzled hamster. "It's true, I'm terrified of him - but I never wanted - they wouldn't even let him go mad. At least my parents - " He stopped and looked down, taking a slow breath to compose himself. "At least for my parents it was over in a couple of hours, but Professor Snape - _weeks_ of it, and then to be thrown in prison after all that, that's just so - You know. And I can't help my mum and dad, but I can help the Professor, a bit. And I'm actually pretty good at these sort of - domestic charms."

He looked up at Lynsey then and gave her a shy, wry smile. "But I dunno how you manage to be actual friends with him, like, without getting your head chewed off."

"Oh, he's all right. If he gets too stroppy I just ignore him - or tell him to belt up. Really."

"God, I can't _imagine_ telling Professor Snape to belt up. Well, I mean I can - I just can't imagine still being alive afterwards!"

"Nah. Where he comes from, they cultivate rudeness as a virtue - it's called 'being blunt' - and he's under a lot of stress and he does tend to deal with it by giving it to other people. But he's all right, the Prof - he'd never willingly do you any sort of physical injury, and he'd cheerfully risk his life to prevent anyone else from doing so."

"I think 'cheerfully' is overstating the case," Lupin said, grinning - "muttering sourly the whole way is more like it, but certainly he'd do it."

"Um. I suppose so. But even his voice is terrifying. So - slithery."

Lupin's face twisted suddenly. "When the - when He Who Must Not Be Named projected the, the sound of... We didn't even know who it was, it was just - a man, screaming, on and on for days, and then suddenly hearing _that_ voice - that silky, insinuating voice of his - groaning 'No more! Please, no more' - it was... horrible. Shattering. Which was the point, of course."

"My parents - begged," Neville said, staring at the deck again. "For each other. My parents begged for each other. Now that I've heard Professor Snape - like that, I just feel so _sorry_ for him."

"Well," said Lynsey, "show some rudiments of sense and don't actually tell him that, or he really will chew your bloody head off." That or curl up in a ball from sheer embarrassment.

"Oh, I wouldn't. I wouldn't dare!"

"It's partly my doing that he's so bloody abrasive," Lupin said glumly. "We - the Marauders - persecuted him so much at school that the poor sod never had a chance to learn how to interact with people except through defensiveness and insults."

"I'll tell you how you deal with the Prof, Neville," Lynsey said idly, watching the salt-spray forming dew-drops on the back of her wrist. "You have to take his insults as jokes - which they are, usually, even when it's a bit of a malicious joke - and bat the joke back at him, but in a way that doesn't make him feel attacked or scorned. If he insults you and you agree with him and turn it into a joke against yourself, you'll pull the rug out from under his feet completely. And if you do it well enough to make him laugh, he'll eat out of your hand."

"I'd be too scared he might chew it off at the wrist."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

NL to SS: "Is the blanket warm enough, sir? I charmed it myself."

SS to NL: "It hasn't actually exploded yet, although it's early days. You'll make someone a wonderful wife one day, Longbottom."

NL to SS: "Well I've already got a pinny - it's got roses on, and all."

SS to NL: "I'm sure you look very fetching in it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

L O'C to SS: "You sound a lot brighter for having regular meals again."

SS to L O'C: "I don't think 'regular' is a word which I personally would ever associate with a trifle pasty."

L O'C to SS: "_Caveat emptor_: you should look before you bite."

SS to L O'C: "Oh no, I quite like the lucky-dip element. It's like eating Every-Flavour Beans, except you know you won't get vomit or machine-oil."

L O'C to SS: "Is there anything you'd particularly like?"

SS to L O'C: "I'd kill for a bit of fresh fruit."

RL to SS: "OK, I'm sure we can arrange that."

SS to RL: "How are you managing to replenish the supplies on the boat?"

RL to SS: "By broom."

SS to RL: "Who have you found that's mad enough to fly across the north sea - in bloody January?"

RL to SS: "Harry and Ron. (And it's February - just!)"

SS to RL: "I will never, ever live this down as long as I live."

RL to SS: "Oh, it's much worse than that: Harry is paying for the boat."

The answer was unprintable, and tore a hole right through the page. Lupin looked at it and grinned, then looked slightly sheepish - as far as was possible for a wolf in man's clothing. "I still can't resist teasing him, a bit. But I'm touched - I really am - that he trusts me, and Neville here, not to put anything foul into the pasties. Time was, he would have _expected_ me to send him vomit and machine-oil."

"Time was, you would have," Lynsey replied.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

SS to L O'C: "Don't let Dobby panic you: I'm all right."

L O'C to SS: "Dobby says they beat you again - really badly. Enough to really upset him."

SS to L O'C: "If there is such a thing as hypochondria-by-proxy Dobby has it. I'm fine, really I am - it doesn't bother me."

L O'C to SS: "Well, it bloody-well bothers me! Why did they beat you?"

SS to L O'C: "Bored. Decided to see how far could provoke them before they hit me. Found out."

Lynsey clicked her tongue in irritation. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprized - I knew he had a perverse sense of humour."

"You should have been at school with him" Lupin said with a sideways grin. "You have no idea."

"The worst of it is, I can quite see why he did it. The guards are not supposed to even show that they've heard him speak, are they, let alone answer him - so I suppose provoking them like that was a way of forcing them to acknowledge his existence. But he's still a damn' fool."

"Well, look at it from his point of view," Lupin said seriously. "If the guards aren't allowed to acknowledge that they've heard him speak that means he can be as cuttingly and creatively rude as he pleases and they aren't supposed to hit him - and if they do, that means he's won. A fellow's got to make his own amusements, in Azkaban."

L O'C to SS: "Bloody lunatic bloody fool man."

* * *

**Author's note:**

To "blow the gaff" is to give away a secret enterprize.

For the benefit of foreigners who may not be familiar with the beast, a Cornish pasty (or pastie) is basically a circle of savoury pastry about 8" across, onto which you put a big dollop of filling, and then fold the circle in half around the filling and pinch the edges together in a crimped wave. The result is about the same shape as a Portuguese Man o' War jellyfish. They were originally invented as a sort of edible lunch-box for Cornish miners. The filling traditionally is diced meat - either mutton or beef - with vegetables, but there are cases on record of large pasties being made with a savoury course at one end and a dessert at the other.

"A cat may look at a queen" (or sometimes king) is a tradition British proverb, meaning that people of low-rank are entitled to look at the doings of those of higher rank. It has been suggested that it dates from a period when subjects were not supposed to look directly at the face of the sovereign.

"You'll make someone a wonderful wife one day" is a common British remark said to a male who is good at cooking or housework.

"Pinny" is short for "pinafore." A pinafore strictly is a wrap-around apron with armholes, but "pinny" tends to get used loosely for any sort of apron that you might wear in a kitchen (you wouldn't call a blacksmith's leather apron a pinny, for example).

"_Caveat emptor_" - "Let the buyer beware." Basically, check that the goods are sound before you pay for them, because you won't get a refund.

A wolf in sheep's clothing is a dangerous person who is pretending to be harmless - often, some kind of infiltrator.

"Hypochondria-by-proxy" - a play on Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a controversial condition which probably does exist but which was grossly over-diagnosed by an obsessive British medical expert, in which sufferers deliberately make somebody else ill (usually either a parent making a child ill, or a nurse with a patient), or fake illness in another person, in order to enjoy the drama and attention which comes with their treatment.


	6. 05 Oil and Water

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**N.B.:** The people passing notes back and forth would write percentage signs, not spell out the words "per cent," because that's quicker and less formal - but ffic doesn't display percentage signs.

* * *

**5: OIL AND WATER**  
((_In which various things are stirred, or stirred up._)) 

"You understand, Dobby," Neville said gravely, leaning forwards the better to meet the house-elf at a more equal height: "we have to go back to the shore to get more - more de-soul. The stuff that makes the boat run. You can either stay here with Professor Snape or come with us."

"Dobby can't leave poor Master Severus, oh no. Who would feed him? Who would keep him company?"

"But you do understand, Dobby," said Lupin, "that if anything - well, goes wrong, you'll be on your own, a hundred and fifty miles from land? If you get caught - well, we couldn't protect you. They might, um, punish you."

"Dobby not care about Dobby getting punished. Only care about Master Severus."

Lynsey looked at him sideways. "Because you don't care whether you get hurt or not, or because you don't think they _could_ hurt you?"

The strange little figure made a half-bow. "Dobby is _free_ - is nothing to stop Dobby defending himself now."

"And that would be... enough?"

"Oh yes. Dobby will make them sorry they meddled with Dobby. But Dobby does not care even if Dobby _would_ be hurt."

"That's very - that's very noble of you, Dobby," Lupin said, a small frown creasing his brows.

"Master Severus fights for us all, against He Who Must Not Be Named. Now Dobby will fight for him."

"Somebody should," Neville said seriously.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

RL to SS: "We're going to have to head back to shore tomorrow morning for two days, to refuel. We can either leave Dobby here to hide out among the other house-elves - he insists they'll let him - or take him with us. If he comes with us, you don't get any decent food for two days; if he stays you eat, but if anything goes wrong and he gets caught you could lose this line of communication altogether - as well as probably getting beaten up again. Dobby insists they can't do anything to him even if they catch him, so it's your call."

Across eighteen miles of open water, Lynsey could feel the jolt, and the thought. _"Don't leave me." _

SS to RL: "Will abide by Dobby's judgement. Would discuss with him direct, but afraid guards would hear, and don't know if he can read! If he thinks risk of being caught less than 20 per cent," (here the word "tell" had been written and then crossed out) "ask him to stay. If he would."

NL to SS: "Professor Lupin said to tell you Dobby says 10 per cent, at the outside. I'll be leaving enough food with him for you for three days, just in case - I'll charm it so it doesn't go off or stale or anything."

RL to SS: "I wonder if I could ask you a great favour? It will be full moon on the 10th, so I should begin taking Wolfsbane the day after tomorrow, once we get back to shore. Hermione Granger has been brewing it for me, from the notes you left - she'll be making it up tonight or tomorrow morning, and I expect she'll Apparate to Seahouses with some before we set sail again - but she doesn't brew it as well as you do. I know it's a lot to ask, but I wondered if you could supervise her?"

SS to RL: "Forgive my obtuseness, Lupin, but - how?"

"Sarcastic bastard," Lupin muttered under his breath.

RL to SS: "I've got one of the Order's Talking Glasses here - I use it to communicate with Harry. I could easily re-key it to you and Hermione, and then Dobby could keep it with him and bring it to you between guards."

SS to RL: "Yes of course, I'd just love to spend my days coaching frizzy-haired know-alls on advanced-level brewing, over a distance of five hundred miles, in five-minute instalments. (And no, Remus - for once in my life I am not being sarcastic. Anything is better than watching mould grow.) PS one wonders what Longbottom's idea of 'or anything' is. Might the pasties grow purple pincers and scuttle off sideways?"

NL to SS: "I could probably make them do that if you really want."

"Just for that," Neville muttered as an aside to Lynsey, "I'm going to fill one with spinach. The iron will be good for him."

Talking Hermione through the brewing process evidently did him good, as well: at least, Dobby reported that Master Severus was so pre-occupied with finding fault with the Hat-Knitting Miss's technique (in a fierce undertone, huddled under the blanket, since his chain was not long enough to allow him to reach the muffled corner of the cell) that he had come close to being caught at least three times, and Dobby had had to take the mirror off him bodily and whip it away before the guards could see it.

They left the mirror with Dobby, in the event; if anything happened to prevent their return, it meant that Snape (and Dobby, for that matter) would not be cut off from all contact with the Order. And Neville, as promised, made up a stack of preserved pasties, although in view of Snape's comment about purple pincers he played around with them just a bit. Some were very odd shapes (there was a fish-shaped one which, perversely, contained rice pudding with raspberry jam), and at least one was tartan.

And then there was nothing to say to each other except the same message on all sides - "Good luck."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Two and a half tonnes of diesel - more expense for Harry, but at least they got to spend the night in a guest house in a crescent with the attractive name of Kippy Law, to wash the stiffness of salt out of their hair with fresh water and sleep in a decent bed. Lynsey hardly could sleep, though, for the cold clutch of loneliness and fear in her belly which was not her own, and she wasn't the only one who was worrying about what sort of bed Snape was sleeping on. When Hermione arrived, looking slightly irritated and clutching a large vacuum flask, Neville waylaid her and could be heard asking her if she could find him a charm to make a mattress more comfortable, without changing its appearance.

"Here you are - hot from the cauldron."

Lupin looked at the plastic mug curiously. "What is this thing?"

"It's called a Thermos flask," Hermione answered patiently. "It's a - a Muggle device for keeping liquids at the same temperature they were when you put them in, whether hot or cold, but I've charmed this one to make it work more efficiently; since Wolfsbane works better if you don't let it cool too much. There should be easily enough there for the week."

Lupin downed the cupful in one long swig to get it over with, and then gagged. "It certainly tastes more like Severus's own brewing - which is to say, even worse than last time."

_"Apparently,"_ she replied rather sourly, "I've been getting the wrist-action completely wrong when I change from clockwise to counter-clockwise stirring - although not the other way, for some reason - and Good King Henry should be peeled before he's chopped. He didn't say that in his notes, of course, or I would have - but somehow it's become my fault."

Harry blew in later that morning, just before they were due to set sail - and looking more like a storm-cloud than a spring breeze. He was carrying another mirror, and he and Ron between them had brought seven full carrier-bags full of food, including, Lynsey noted, a quantity of assorted fresh and tinned fruit.

"Bastard!" Harry spat, throwing the bags down as if he hated them.

"What?" Lupin said warily.

"Scrimgeour - the bloody, bloody bastard."

"What?" Hermione, this time.

"He only came to see me yesterday, didn't he, oozing around about how much he regretted having been forced to pass such an inhumane sentence, such a very psychologically damaging one - as if it was anybody's bloody idea but his own - and how he would be happy to be able to tell the _Prophet_ that I had asked for clemency for Snape and that he had granted it as a special favour to me."

"He said he would let Severus go?" Lupin said sharply.

"Oh no - he'd lose his bloody leverage then, wouldn't he? He said he'd relax Snape's regime - move him into a cell with a window, let him have visitors three times a year - the usual crap." He sat down heavily on the bench overlooking the quay, running his hands through his already messy hair. "That's what all this is fucking about, isn't it? When he thought I was for the Prosecution he thought he could bribe me by punishing Snape, and when he found I was for the Defence that was even better - he realized he could torture Snape to apply pressure on me, to make me cave in and be a good little boy and pose for publicity shots with the Minister. And I may not like the greasy bastard much, but I never wanted this. Especially after - after what Voldemort did to him."

"You mustn't blame yourself, Harry" Hermione said anxiously.

"I don't," he replied grimly. "I blame Scrimgeour. If - if it was the only way to save Snape, I suppose I'd have to bloody do it, but I swear, if we can get Snape safely out then I'm going to nail that bastard, I'm going to tell the _Prophet_ that he held a loyal Order member hostage in order to force the bloody Boy Who Lived to do as he was told..."

"If you do, I'll make sure it gets printed of course," Hermione said seriously.

Lynsey wondered what sort of leverage the girl had, that she seemed so certain she could get a British newspaper - even a wizarding one - to tell the truth. "How did he seem?" she asked curiously. "Scrimgeour, I mean."

"He'd lost a bit of weight," Harry replied thoughtfully. "Actually he looked sort of... haunted."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Getting back into position was harder, without Dobby on board, and they didn't want to pique the curiosity of the crew by insisting on going back to the exact same spot. But the mirror in Dobby's hands was keyed to him as well as to Snape, and once they were in vaguely the right line of country Lupin mirror-called the house-elf and he talked them in, until he could feel the little boat called _Marjorie's Fancy_ cleaving the waves within the twenty-one mile limit of his position sense.

Since they had another mirror on board, now, Dobby took the mirror at his end through to "Master Severus," between guards, so that he could speak to them and know himself not abandoned. He spoke only a few terse words, for fear of being overheard, but Lynsey was shocked at the change in his appearance in just four weeks. He had been starved when she last saw him, but now he was famine thin, despite the food they had smuggled in to him, and he had the same filthy, matted hair and scruffy apology for a beard that he had had when she had first met him, in Voldemort's halls - although fewer bruises, which was some mercy. He was dressed, if you could call it that, in a thin, pale-grey wisp of worn cotton which clung to his skin in the dampness of the cell, and he had the blanket wrapped round him as best he could, with his wrist chained.

"We wouldn't leave you, man," Lupin said quietly. "We'll get you out of there somehow, I swear." Snape looked at him, wan and outworn, and then nodded tersely. Shifting slightly he looked past Lupin, through the depths of the mirror, and cocked an eyebrow at Lynsey with a thin flicker of mockery. She grinned back.

"Hello Prof. How were the mutant pasties?"

He gave her one of his brief, there-and-gone smiles. "Odd."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Snape was very pleased to receive mandarins and beer and (a moment of inspiration on Lynsey's part, since proper coffee was too heavily scented) chocolate-coated coffee beans with his first food parcel after their return, though Dobby had to be very careful to remove all traces of the orange fruit-peel. Ointment for his wrist, as well, for the manacle was beginning to gall him. They settled comfortably into routine again; idle chatter passing back and forth, more to give the prisoner a mental life-line to hang on to than to convey hard information, though Snape did scribble down notes on some thoughts he had had on various problems in potion-making "Just in case," as his angular scrawl put it, "anything happens."

The weather was fairly bright, if a bit drizzly, and between showers Lupin sat on deck and painted, capturing the glimmer and movement of the waves even without using the magic which normally animated wizarding artworks. Dobby seemed to be conducting some sort of flirtation with one of the local elves. Neville had brought a stack of trashy novels, to read between sessions in the galley, and Lynsey herself was getting on well with the website she was designing, now that her nerves and the Prof's were more settled, and in the afternoons she worked on the wand - sycamore, with a core of pure silver, though she had to be careful about leaving any scraps of silver wire around. Lupin, reaching out for his brush, put his hand on a snippet of the white metal and promptly came out in a rash.

She had chosen sycamore in the first instance simply because it was white and smooth and durable - a bitch of a wood to work, one which ate the edge off a blade in a few minutes and gave a whole new emphasis to the term "hard wood," but the results were beautiful and would last almost forever. But its magical meaning was also appropriate, for it was said to impart energy to the weary, to relieve tension and raise a heavy heart, and to promote appreciation of all that was sweet and beautiful in life. She had started out with a thick piece about fifteen inches long and then whittled it down a bit, leaving a thicker handle and a tapering tip, and now she began to cut grooves into the handle; a ring around it at either end, a little inside the limits of the thicker wood, and a criss-cross of channels joining them. These she meant to fill with silver wire, when the thing was done.

A brief conversation with the others confirmed that it was possible magically to fuse two bits of metal together, making her criss-cross wires into one solid network as if welded there but without burning the wood, and that Neville should be able to do this (since Lupin could not handle the silver). With that in mind, she drilled three narrow holes, angling through the white smoothness of the sycamore from the groove at the rim, emerging close to the centre of the pommel-end, where they could be fused to the central core - one single lacework of silver, under the hand and through the heart of the wood.

As she worked the needle-file into all the little grooves, smoothing and deepening, the deckhand - the stocky blond one with the earring, not the Goth - sidled up to her.

"'E's quite good, inne?" he said, with a nod to Lupin.

"Yes - yes, I suppose he is."

"'Ow come," the boy said in a low, confiding tone, "'ow come, if 'e can afford to hire a boat an' a crew an' all, 'e dresses loik a pauper?"

"Oh, he's - very eccentric. Barking, you might say."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They had been back two days when the mirror in Lupin's possession flowered into life. Lynsey, craning over his shoulder on the quiet, saw the stern face and pointed nose of Minerva McGonagall and heard her say "...speak to Severus?"

Lupin did something to the mirror which caused it to switch to Dobby, who was spending more and more time on the rock, when he wasn't acting as courier. "As soon as the guards have gone by, take the mirror in to Severus and tell him that Minerva is asking to speak to him about an Order matter."

It seemed that when there were three people talking back and forth between three mirrors, whoever was currently speaking showed up on both the other two. The mirror in Lupin's calloused hands now showed Snape, speaking _sotto voce_ for fear of the guards but still with a distinct waspish edge.

"What is this, Minerva?" he said sharply. "Occupational therapy?"

"No! I really could use your advice, Severus."

"Very well - fire away, then."

Lynsey wasn't sure whether to listen or not - she didn't like to eavesdrop on matters which were not really any of her concern, but at the same time she liked to hear the sound of her professor's rough/smooth voice - and Neville was listening in unashamedly. But she needn't have worried, for she could understand only a fraction of what was being said - something about unauthorized use of a flue, she thought, and inappropriate behaviour by somebody apparently called Dung, and "Zabini appears to be sitting on the fence until she sees which way the wind is blowing," which conjured up a very strange image. She did clearly hear Minerva say something-something "and Alastor - " and her professor's smooth voice finish "...is as much use as the proverbial fart in a colander."

The conversation was not without its dangers. Twice Snape shut his eyes and began to mutter and rave in a way which was initially quite alarming, until Lynsey realized he was pretending to the guards that he had been talking in his sleep; and his image winked out as Dobby whisked the mirror and himself away into hiding.

Finally she heard Minerva's voice say gently "You look like Hell."

"Thank you for that vote of confidence" said the professor's sour unmistakable voice.

"In answer to the question which you are carefully not asking me - yes, I am still certain I will be able to get you out of there soon. We've got the old slug on our side now - though Tonks says she had to search every lettuce-patch in England to find him - and he is pulling every string he can find."

"That's... reassuring," he replied, in a voice which shook only slightly. "I am... coping adequately, but we really should try to put an end to this before the cost of the boat bankrupts Potter completely; amusing though that might be in some respects."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Every day, Lupin knocked back a cup of Wolfsbane, grimacing, and Neville made him a mug of hot chocolate to take away the taste; the werewolf seemed to have an exceedingly sweet tooth. Snape was still a prisoner, and in another day they would have to strike out for shore again - a day or two early, as far as re-fuelling went, but they had told the crew that Lupin had an important appointment on the night of the tenth, which was very nearly not a lie. Lynsey used the mobile 'phone to book rooms in Bamburgh, eight miles to the north of Seahouses, in a guest-house which permitted customers to bring "well-behaved and quiet dogs." Snape was delighted to hear that Lupin was going to have to wear a collar for the night and suggested, helpfully, that as it was February a nice navy-blue dog-coat might also be in order.

But the idea of leaving him behind again, still trapped, was not funny at all. As Lynsey helped Neville to prepare dinner - sausages and mashed potato with an apple and onion sauce - and watched him ladle a healthy portion of it into two pasties, that sense of unease came to a head so abruptly that she felt for a moment as if she was having a heart-attack, her chest suddenly tight and her blood pounding in her ears.

She clutched at the kitchen counter to steady herself, but the boat heaved up and sideways and she lost her footing, landing ignominiously on her hip on the galley floor. "Lynsey!" she heard Neville saying urgently. "Lynsey - what's wrong?"

"Something's happened," she replied, trying to stop her teeth from chattering long enough to speak. "Get Dobby. Something's happened to the professor."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Master Severus is not there" Dobby said, bobbing unhappily. "Dobby not know why. Dobby will go back now and ask the other house-elves if they know where Master Severus is, and if answer is 'No,' Dobby will ask the ghosts."

"I suppose there would be... a lot of ghosts, in Azkaban?" Neville asked.

"The air of Azkaban is thick with them, Master Neville, but most of them are - not sane. But Dobby knows a few who are."

And all the time, Lynsey could feel mad terror, his, hers, clutching at her chest, choking her. But at least, this time, when she reached out her mind to him he knew that she was real, and she felt his spirit cling to her like a drowning man.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the end, it was quite simple. One of the guards, taking food into the cell, had stumbled on the icy floor and flung out a hand to steady herself against the bed, and she had realized at once that Snape's blanket was artificially warm. Within seconds he had been hauled from the bed and beaten half senseless. They had not, at least, realized that he had had outside help, since they knew that no-one could possibly have broken in (the tendency for wizards not even to notice that house-elves existed did have its uses). They assumed that he had charmed the blanket himself, using wandless magic.

"Guards believe, Master Severus more powerful than they thought," Dobby said unhappily. "More of a threat to them. Mordus Flitch, old ghost, he tells Dobby, poor Master Severus is under twenty-four-hour watch now, hands chained together, can't make spell gestures, Dobby can't get near him without being seen and heard."

Lynsey sat huddled on her bunk in the forecastle, trying to project calming, reassuring thoughts, but her hands kept drawing in against her chest, involuntarily, crossed and pressed together at the wrist as his hands were now bound; and she could feel how truly disturbing it was to be surrounded by people who watched him, relentlessly, and yet would never meet his eyes. At least, though, he knew that she was really there; if he was falling, he at least had something to fall back against, and he knew now that there were people in the world who cared enough to try their hardest to get him out - whether or not he really believed that they would succeed. His fear and loss and loneliness gnawed at her - but not, thank the gods, the hard panic and despair he had felt before.

The worst of it was, there was nothing they could do about it; they _had_ to set sail almost at once, if they didn't want to have to explain to a Muggle crew why their eccentric water-colourist had been replaced by a very large husky. Dobby volunteered to stay behind again, saying that Mordus Flitch (who apparently had been a famous early Victorian forger who passed dead leaves off as golden Galleons), at least, might be able to speak to poor Master Severus and comfort him without the guards noticing, even if he himself could not. They knew that Dobby would do his best, and that his best, though eccentric, was pretty good; but it was with heavy hearts that the passengers of the _Marjorie's Fancy_ watched the coast of Northumberland draw nearer through the bone-cold mist.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Good King Henry is a plant, _Chenopodium bonus-henricus_, also called Allgood, Fat Hen and Wild Spinach, which can be used in salads and to feed poultry.

In British folklore, fairies traditionally paid for goods with gold coins which turned back into autumn leaves by morning.


	7. 06 And the Truth Shall Make You Free

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**6: AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE**  
((_In which Minerva exploits her sex appeal._)) 

Bamburgh was a smaller village than Seahouses but much more famous and more touristy, since it boasted one of the most spectacular castles in all England, standing out boldly against the sea. They walked inland of it until they came to wooded ground; skirting the caravan park at Glororum, looking for a quiet place to sit and wait until the full moon should do its work. There was no point in going to the guest house until Lupin was transformed; no point in paying for a bed for someone who was going to sleep in front of the hearth. They had hardly found their spot before the moon came out of the clouds and the man Lupin gasped and twisted and fell away, leaving a great grey wolf in his place. Lynsey fitted the collar round his neck with an apology, knowing that he kept at least some of his human mind under the influence of Wolfsbane, although she herself could hardly think for the blood hammering in her ears, whispering that her friend was alone and afraid and she could do nothing.

Transformation complete, Lupin ambled off to rummage through some interesting piles of dead leaves, and Neville fished out the Talking Glass. After a number of false starts, including one where it turned into a magnifying glass instead, he managed to get it to work. At first it was dark, like a bowl of night, but after a few minutes Minerva McGonagall's pointy austere face swum into view.

"Ah, Mr Longbottom," she said calmly. "I take it that Remus Lupin is... indisposed."

"He's eating beetles, if that's what you mean, miss. Professor, something's gone wrong with Professor Snape." He explained the situation fairly concisely and coherently, and McGonagall's already sharp face tightened and hardened into grim certainty.

"Thank you, Longbottom. I see I shall have to bring matters to a head sooner than I had anticipated. I had scheduled a meeting with the Minister for this Friday but I shall have to insist on bringing it forward. I'm sure if I... explain matters to him he'll be able to squeeze me in."

"You mean if you um drop a hint that you know he's gay and his wife doesn't?"

"Oh no Mr Longbottom, Minister Scrimgeour is entirely heterosexual" she replied, rrolling her rrs melodically, "as he has demonstrated with..." There was a pause during which she looked away, evidently consulting a written list. "Ah, yes, with seven young ladies other than his wife during the preceding month. One of them I believe was his sister in law. I will contact you as soon as I have his reply."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was hard to believe that without the Wolfsbane Remus Lupin would have turned into a monster, still with a trace of human about the face, but with nothing human left in his head except the random viciousness which wolves would seldom stoop to. She rubbed her hands through the thick fur on his back and pressed her face against his shoulder, praying incoherently for Minerva's success and her professor's swift release.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In one way, taking the boat out again seemed pointless, when they could no longer use it as a platform from which to contact Snape; but if Dobby was discovered and there was no boat for him to jump to, he would be trapped; and besides, being on the boat would at least give them the feeling that they were doing something for Snape, however futile.

Seeing Harry wince as he wrote out cheques for another two thousand for Lupin to give to the crew (evidently Gringotts had a Muggle Transactions department, and enough savvy to issue a normal-looking cheque-book instead of a parchment one), Lynsey muttered "Look - this is getting ridiculous. If I re-mortgage my flat, it'll take a couple of months but I can raise enough money to pay you back."

Harry sighed, looking down at his hands, and shook his head. "No it's - it's OK. Really. It's mostly my Dad's money, isn't it - Mum's family weren't all that well-off - and my Dad treated Professor Snape like shit when they were at school. If it hadn't been for him and Sirius, Snape probably would've never've joined Voldemort in the first place. So it's right, isn't it, that my Dad should help get him out."

"That's - very noble of you. True, too, but still noble."

"Yeah, well," he said, scuffing at the ground with his shoe and looking embarrassed, "Gryffindors are stupid that way."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She should have been depressed - had expected to be eaten up with grief and anxiety over the professor, but as the boat lifted up over the waves her heart lifted with it, and she felt unreasonable hope and fierce defiance rather than misery, as she was drawn to him like a lodestone - as if it was the hot weight of his mind which reeled them in over the water. Something was working right, her mind ran into his at the edges and they were moving the same way, he was no longer pulling against her - he did believe, he did, that they were working to free him, that they had at least some chance of succeeding, and so it mattered that he should be sane when they did so and he had set his mind to it, to not being overwhelmed... If nothing else, his pride would not permit him to be seen by the Order in a state of babbling collapse.

When they were sure the crew weren't nearby to see it Lupin mirror-called Dobby to check that he was all right. The strange little figure bobbed his head anxiously.

"Dobby thinks Master Severus is embarrassed to walk, to exercise in front of watchers and he is hungry and cold and still stiff from being beaten, so he just lies down, mostly, and tries to sleep. Dobby knows this because Dobby has swapped with one of the prison elves so Dobby can clean on Master Severus's corridor, go in cell sometimes so he can see Dobby is still here and he is not abandoned."

That explained the fierce, defiant hope. Probably few people would be reassured by the sight of Dobby, with his leathery brown skin, his needle nose and his bulging acid-green eyes like twin limes, but beauty, she supposed, was in the eye of the beholder, and the professor was a bizarre-looking cove himself.

"That is excellent news, Dobby," Lupin said gravely. "You really do seem to have a great deal of influence with the prison elves - you're sure that they won't betray you? I don't want Severus or you to be punished."

"Master Lupin is good to care about Dobby, sir, but Dobby is quite safe. To many elves, especially - those who are not happy in their work, Dobby is, is a hero, sir, like Harry Potter is to wizards - if it is not presumptuous to say it."

The news from Minerva was frustrating. She had managed to bully the Minister into seeing her two days early, all right, but he was stalling, and insisting that whilst he might consider a relaxation in Snape's regime in return for the Order's co-operation - "Harry's rubber-stamp on his ruddy policies" Lupin muttered under his breath - release was really out of the question. He had suggested, indeed, that even if it could be proven that Snape had killed Dumbledore on Dumbledore's own orders, that order had been an illegal one and Snape was still guilty of a crime for obeying it.

"But Professor," Neville said anxiously, craning over Lupin's shoulder, "didn't you tell him that you knew about - you know?"

"I did. He said that it was only my word against his, and unless I could produce evidence of these unsubstantiated rumours neither his brother nor the press would credit it - and suggested that if I were to be seen as a madwoman making wild unfounded accusations it would do Severus's case no good at all. He didn't put it quite so bluntly, but that was the gist of it. He seems to believe he has Rita Skeeter in his pocket - from which I infer that he's been in _her_ pocket more than once."

It took Neville a moment to work that one out; when he did, he went pink to the tips of his ears. "But Professor, that's - what can we do?"

"I shall just have to fire a warning shot across his bows," she replied crisply. "A few 'unsubstantiated rumours' in tomorrow's papers should be enough to convince him that I am in earnest."

"But how will you get them published, Minerva?" Lupin asked with a frown. "If he has managed to get the Skeeter woman on his side..."

"Hermione Granger has a certain... influence over Ms Skeeter which - well, suffice it to say that she believes it will exceed Minister Scrimgeour's influence, and I believe she is right. And failing that, Xenophilius Lovegood is eager to publish."

"And failing _that_," Lynsey muttered to Lupin, "I know at least two people in the SF crowd who can make bombs..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"MINISTER'S CALL-GIRL COCKUP" made the front page the following day, and even hedged about as it was with careful allegeds and suggesteds it still made Scrimgeour's hair curl. McGonagall was on line to them by lunchtime, looking grimly satisfied.

"He has marked Severus's case as 'under review.' I told him that your party would prefer to collect Severus by boat rather than by Portkey; forgive me Lynsey, but I let him think that your experience with Lucius Malfoy had left you nervous of that mode of travel. It seemed wiser not to let him know you needed the boat in order to collect your private agent."

"That's OK."

She was back again the same evening. "The wards on Azkaban are to be lifted for half an hour, starting at nine a.m. tomorrow morning. You may bring the boat in and moor at the landing-stage, pending Severus's release."

"That's - that's brilliant, Professor!"

"It is certainly hopeful, Mr Longbottom, but I for one will not permit myself to relax until Severus is safely on board - and out of wand-range of Azkaban."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Lynsey expected to feel as high as a kite when they actually drew in sight of Azkaban, when they were within spitting distance of getting Severus out, but after four days of freezing cold again, of gnawing hunger and the guards' relentless impersonal eyes she could feel his resolve to stay positive beginning to flag a bit, and her mood was plummeting with his, as much as she tried to keep them both up.

And Azkaban was a horror; she could feel the despair radiating from it before they even came in sight of it. The island it stood on was perhaps three hundred yards long by half that wide and the prison covered most of it, rising straight up out of the sea like a grey, rotting tooth, its tiny windows barred and grudging. Nothing seemed to grow there except seaweed and a few stunted bushes (apparently it was Unplottable even to puffins), but Lupin set a charm on the crew to make them see it subtly differently - to see the island greener and the fortress far smaller, something like the Bass Rock.

They had told the crew that they needed to make landfall at the island in order to pick up a friend who had been... "Bird-watching," Lupin said firmly.

When they had tied up at the damp little landing-stage, Lupin went in by the great iron door to speak to whoever was on duty there, but he came back out looking grim.

"They won't let me see him," he said, slumping dejectedly onto the bench in the galley. "They said that they had not been - had not been notified of any change of plan in relation to Severus. They know we're here as part of an appeal but as far as they're concerned he is still... no one is to speak to him. Bastards. They won't allow him even one friendly word... if the appeal fails and he's to be kept here, they want his isolation to be unbroken." He rubbed his face with his hands. "They actually said that; that he had been sentenced to live in complete isolation until his death, and they had no authority to say otherwise. When I think that Sirius spent almost _twelve years_ in this dump..."

"But Professor Snape won't be here that long, will he?" Neville said anxiously.

"God, I hope not."

"We should have known something would go wrong," Lynsey said glumly. "Today of all days."

"Why? I mean, why today particularly?"

"Fucking Friday the Thirteenth, isn't it?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"The Minister is concerned that the other members of the Wizengamot will not endorse any decision to free Severus," said McGonagall's precise voice, "which, in fact, is a valid point: we want Severus's release to be incontestable. But I have told him that they are likely to concur. It will take two or three days for Horace and me to ensure that that is the case; maybe four, since some of them will I suppose be going away for the weekend."

"Macpherson - I got the impression that Macpherson wouldn't need much pressurizing."

"Indeed, I believe that Armand Macpherson favoured a free pardon from the beginning, but he was over-ruled. That _is_ the line that I have advized the Minister to take: to say that the court had convicted Severus of killing Dumbledore knowing and accepting that he did so on Dumbledore's own order, but holding that that order was an illegal one which he should not have obeyed - and that in view of the authority which Dumbledore held over him the Wizengamot has decided to show clemency."

Lupin grinned like - well, like a wolf. "And how did he like having his decisions dictated to him by a 'sheltered elderly lady'?"

"To be honest, I think he was just glad to have somebody offer him a way out. Ms Skeeter was verry annoyed to find out that she wasn't his only... side-interest. I told him I would ask Miss Granger to call her off - at a price."

Listening to them, Lynsey found herself vaguely uneasy at the idea that somebody who had been convicted of murder (however wrongly) could be freed as the result of a combination of blackmail and pressure from the press, without even a re-trial. But since the original trial had been more like a Soviet show-trial than anything she would recognize as due process, she supposed that in this case two wrongs would succeed in making a right. And the sooner the better; after coming so close, the delay was gnawing at her nerves, and it took an effort of will not to allow her own anxiety to bleed through to Severus. Four more days! If he had been fit to begin with it would be nothing, but starved and ill as he already was she wondered what condition they would find him in. After McGonagall had gone off-line, she went into a huddle with the other two to make up a list of things which might help get him back on his feet, and which Harry and Ron could bring out to them.

As for the Muggle crew, who all had a faintly dazed look whenever they looked towards the fortress, they told them that their friend had been delayed by an especially rare tern, and would be along in a few days. Afterwards the Goth one shuffled up to Lynsey, not quite looking at her, and murmured "You lot are really international drug-dealers or diamond-smugglers or something, aren't you?"

She thought about that one. "No we're... the sort who _catch_ criminals. Sort of."

"Ah." He gave her a slightly shifty look which made her wonder what he'd been up to.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They went ashore, they did, it was good to stretch their legs although the atmosphere of the island was so terrible that even the crew felt it, and slunk back to their boat. But the rest of them, the Away Team Lynsey privately called them, they went through the door into the Devil's keep. Lynsey could see at once what Dobby had meant; the very stones leaked sorrow and fear and she could hardly begin to imagine how much worse it must have been when the Dementors had been there - when her professor had been there for a month as a young man, not much older than Neville.

The door opened into a vast empty entrance hall, with nothing in it but four guards waiting with wands drawn; anybody who tried to make it across to the doorway out without permission would be a clear target. Even to them as guests it was intimidating to have to cross that echoing space under so many hostile eyes. At the far side there were two doors, one of which led to the cells and the other, as she would later discover, to the staff quarters.

But it was important to go in, to talk to the prison staff; Lupin wanted to spy out the lie of the land and speak to the guards, so that when they got the go-ahead they would be able to get Snape out as swiftly and painlessly as possible. Also, Lupin had a morbid desire to see the cell in which his dead friend Sirius had spent twelve miserable years, condemned for thirteen murders which (however much of a murderous little amateur psychopath he might have been at school) he had not committed, and one of the friendlier guards was happy to oblige - even if it meant disturbing the square-built, sullen-looking young woman who was the cell's current inhabitant. Lynsey noticed that she seemed much better fed than the professor, and had two quite new-looking blankets; he really had been singled out for special vindictiveness.

"What do you want?" the girl growled, backing into a corner.

"I just wanted to see - a friend of mine was imprisoned here, and I just wanted to see..."

"Bully for you."

The cell was small, and cold, but it did at least have a view of the sea. Later they asked to be shown where Snape was being held, so that they could plan their journey out, but they were permitted only as far as the far end of the corridor. Lupin opened his mouth to call out to Snape that they were there, and a grim-looking mouth-breather type pointed a wand at them and snapped _"Silencio!_

"Did you think," he said with an ugly grin, "that I'd fall for that one? Silence he was condemned to, and silence he's going to get. He talks in his sleep sometimes, begging prettily for someone to speak to him, but he'll die alone if I have any say."

Later they learned that the sullen girl had killed her girlfriend in a fit of jealous rage, and tried to dispose of the body by Transfiguring it into a tree-stump.

Later they passed Dobby in a corridor, and he gave a performance of not-knowing-them so elaborate that even the thickest of the guards looked at him oddly.

Later they sat in the staff canteen, drinking tea wearily and waiting for the latest word from McGonagall, hoping against hope that she could get them permission actually to speak to Snape. And Lynsey shunted along to the end of the table, and very quietly began engaging the mouth-breather in conversation, until she had coaxed him into a quite animated discussion about his bunion.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What the _Hell_ was that about?" Lupin snapped, as they made their disconsolate way back to the boat.

"What?"

"You! Talking to that - that creature. God! You heard him, practically licking his lips over what they're doing to Severus!"

"And do you think, tomorrow, when he looks at Severus and instead of a murderer he sees a friend of that nice woman who was taking such an interest in his feet and his dahlias, do you think he'll treat him worse, or better?"

Neville grinned at her. "That's really Slytherin of you, miss."

"It's... basic witch stuff. My kind of witch."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Three days - another three days of this, while she could feel her professor's resolve crumbling before the forces of misery and cold and constant, gnawing hunger, and she sang to him under her breath about herbs and stars and brave horses and the watch on the deep; while the crew grew restive with nothing to do except get drunk, and there was nothing for the Lupin/Snape party to do either except cook, and go over and over the list of things they needed for Snape (which Harry was getting for him in Diagon Alley), and sometimes slouch reluctantly onto land and into the keep just to remind the guards that they were still there. Lynsey had got the mouth-breather, whose name was Jared Heggarty, as far as actually playing chess with her, and sometimes allowed him to win. If he had been less unpleasant she would have felt guilty about toying with his affections, but as it was she plastered on a smile which she thought would at least buy her professor some clean food, and hoped not to have to follow through with a kiss. But she was prepared to put up with much worse, if she had to.

At least all this waiting around meant that she had nearly finished the wand for Snape - it remained to be seen whether it would actually work for him.

Finally on the Monday night, almost a week after Snape had been moved to the new cell, a tired but triumphant Minerva appeared in the mirror. "We've done it!" she announced. "Horace managed to get together sufficient of his old contacts to make up a quorum for an extraordinary meeting of the Wizengamot, and between us we bullied enough of them into making the vote swing our way."

"So what does that mean for Severus?" Lupin said tensely.

"A free pardon. Basically they are taking the line we suggested - he is still considered guilty of murder but in light of the circumstances they're prepared to be merciful. Harry and Ron will be coming up to you tonight with the things you requested and the authorization for release, signed by the Minister and by Armand Macpherson - who I may say seemed highly entertained by the whole business. If nothing goes wrong, Severus will be released into your care at eight a.m. tomorrow morning."

"I suppose," Lynsey said thoughtfully, after the celebrations had run their course, and they had warned Dobby to make his goodbyes and stand by to leave, and they were just waiting for Harry, now, "I suppose it's like 'mercy killing' - assisted suicide, you know? I mean, in Muggle law, it's still a crime to kill someone even if they want you to, but the judges are usually lenient. If, that is, he really had killed him..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They told the increasingly dazed crew that Harry and Ron were part of the bird-watching team, and had just come from the island - with a charm to make it stick. Dobby Apparated back to them in a fever of excitement when he heard that the great Harry Potter was going to be on-board. He was sorry to part from the new friends he had made in the kitchens and cellars of Azkaban, but he wanted to be ready so that he could come in with them openly when they went to get "poor Master Severus - just in case," he said, "anything goes wrong." None of the wizards, Lynsey noted, seemed to think that there was anything odd about the idea that a house-elf might be a significant ally in a fight. And Dobby was greatly relieved to wear proper clothes again, if you could call a rather hideous sugared-almond-mauve knee-length pullover "proper." It had apparently been knitted for him by Molly Weasley, in a fit of colour-blindness.

Nobody slept; they were all too sick with nerves. Lynsey could feel no answering leap of anticipation from the professor, and she was privately sure that the bastards hadn't even done him the kindness of telling him that he was to be released tomorrow. She tried hard to push the feeling of movement into his tired brain, the knowledge of freedom coming - but it was hard to maintain that absolute confidence when they had had so many setbacks already.

They decided to leave Ron on-board with the mirror in case of accidents. At seven-forty the following morning Lynsey, Lupin, Neville, Harry and a startlingly mauve Dobby presented themselves at the doors of Azkaban, clutching the precious pardon and order of release.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The walk through the fortress seemed to take forever and everywhere they walked, ragged hands and faces came to the barred apertures in the rank on rank of doors, expecting that they were the early shift come to bring them their breakfast. Lynsey appreciated that it must be very difficult to control and contain criminals who were also powerful magic-users, but there had to be a better way than this. Even knowing that the owners of most of those pathetic, unwashed faces really had committed serious crimes didn't make it much easier to take, and she thought privately that the wizarding world had a damned nerve looking down on Muggles as "primitive." Culturally and intellectually, they seemed to be lagging at least a hundred and fifty years behind the rest of Britain. Maybe two hundred and fifty.

She could feel when they were getting close to Snape; feel the uneasy mix of hot misery and bloody-minded defiance which radiated from him. And no, they had not told him yet: their guide ushered them into a large cell where there were already two guards sprawled on hard chairs, smoking and looking at and past the huddled shape of her professor, curled under his thin blanket and trying to sleep, or at least to shut out the world. Without word or warning, the guard with them strode across to the bed and grabbed Snape by the hair, jerking him half upright. "You - up!" He came awake with a sharp yelp of surprize, tried and failed to catch himself against the bed with his hands tightly cuffed together and fell back against the mattress again, his eyes wild.

"Severus - " Lupin said, stepping forward into his line of sight, and for an instant Lynsey saw her professor's narrow face completely naked, his eyes wide and his expression raw with a mixture of disbelief and desperate hope - and then she saw him give a small convulsive shudder and pull himself on over himself, consciously, composedly, and the lines of hard pride settled over his face like a mask.

"Lupin," he replied, with a small inclination of the head, and held out his bound hands. "I'm afraid you find me at a disadvantage; you will have to help me to sit up."

Lupin quickly bent down and clasped his colleague's hands in his, drawing him upright - though Lynsey noted that Snape's own hands looked limp and numb. "It's all right," Lupin said quietly, "Minerva did it. We're getting you out of here." Snape simply nodded, curtly, and Lupin put a hand on his shoulder.

"Will you leave us to get him dressed now, please?" Lupin said to the three guards, but the one who had led them there shook her head, muttering that she had no such orders, and one of the others grinned unpleasantly.

"Wouldn't want to miss the show, would we?"

It was Dobby who rounded on him, with a sharp scowl and a peculiar light in his enormous, lime-coloured eyes. "Go, now," he said clearly, pointing a bony finger at them. "You have here no business with him." The three fell back before him, muttering, and oozed out of the room.

As soon as they were gone Lupin sat down on the bed next to Snape, who unbent enough to lean against him in order not to fall. He looked exhausted and ill and as much shocked as relieved; sweating and pale, his face and arms and shins marred by fading bruises. "Get me out of these - bloody things" he growled, holding out his manacled wrists, and Neville knelt in front of him to open them with his wand, but they remained resolutely closed.

"Idiot!" Snape snapped and Neville flinched, but a moment's experiment showed that neither Lupin nor Harry could open them either. They were obviously charmed not to open to magic. And it wasn't as if they could even take him out of there with the cuffs on; a stout chain ran from his wrists to a loop set into the wall.

"Wait here," the little house-elf said firmly, a look of grim power on his face. "Dobby will get keys."

"Suppose they try to make difficulties?" Neville asked anxiously.

"They won't."

While they were waiting Neville gave Snape a flask of clean water, which he drank from very awkwardly with his hands bound as they were, but refused to allow anybody else to hold for him; and a ham sandwich which he wolfed down in about four bites, shaking. And Lupin took the opportunity to shave him, since he could hardly do it himself with his hands tied. Scraping off the lank tatty apology for a beard only showed up more fading bruises, and the remains of a fat lip - and Lynsey noticed a few streaks of grey at his temples.

Dobby returned with the keys and a very smug expression, and Neville carefully undid the handcuffs, which left sore-looking grooves in Snape's bony wrists. The boy took Snape's hands in his and began to rub them gently with soothing ointment, trying to restore the circulation.

The man looked as if he might be going to faint. Harry rummaged through his pockets and produced a small bottle of something which looked as though it probably contained chili. "Sir? I thought you might need some Pepperup." He held the phial out towards Snape, who flinched back violently. "Sir?"

"No, I - no." He shook his head, then looked directly at Lynsey for the first time, and held out his hand to her. Understanding, she reached out and clasped his cold fingers firmly in hers, and felt the rush and drain as he drew energy out of her, as they had done seven weeks ago in Chislehurst Caves. She staggered slightly as he broke his hold and he gave her an odd look, half contrite and half defiantly smug.

She grinned back at him happily. "It's good to see you."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I thought you'd rather walk out in your own clothes than in..." Harry said, nodding at the miserable prison-drab shift thing Snape was wearing, and unfurled an armload of heavy black cloth. "I got this for you in Diagon Alley."

Snape raised his eyebrows at him. "I wasn't aware that you were so... fascinated by me that you knew my measurements, Potter."

"I didn't need to - I just used Ron as a model. He's at least as tall as you now, and much the same build."

"I suppose he is... God, that makes me feel old."

"I'll just clean you up a bit," Lupin said apologetically, raising his wand. "A quick _Scourgify_..." Snape jerked back as if he'd been stung, his eyes flaring and darkening, and Lupin flushed and ducked his head aside. "You know that I would never..."

"Yes," the other said after a moment, relaxing visibly. "You're not James."

Lynsey wondered what the Hell that was about, and why Harry had also suddenly gone the deep red of shame. She turned her head away politely while Lupin helped her professor to strip and change into the new robes Harry had bought him, even though strictly speaking there was nothing she hadn't already seen. There were new boots with the robes, as well. When he was dressed he looked more armoured, sterner - for the first time she could see why his students found him so forbidding. He staggered slightly as Lupin and Harry helped him to his feet, and more so when Lupin suddenly caught him up into a rough embrace which he returned rather half-heartedly; but weak though he obviously was Lynsey could still see how the flowing black lines of the robes suited him. He looked fierce and fine, even with his hair as straggling and matted as it was, and she could see what he had meant about a heavy cloak making him stand with more confidence.

He was very stiff, though, and winced when he tried to walk. If they had had unlimited time Lynsey would have massaged the cramps away for him, as she had done in the Caves, but they all wanted to be away from there as soon as possible. Which was why one of the things they had asked Harry to bring was a potion for relieving cramps and other muscular pains.

The long walk back through the fortress was nerve-racking; they kept expecting something to go wrong, for the pardon to be rescinded, and the eyes of the other prisoners glared hotly at Snape as he passed them, wondering what he had that they didn't. Lupin and Harry stayed close on either side of him to steady him, ready to grab an elbow when he stumbled, but at least the long walk did give him the chance to find his feet, and by the time they were approaching the entrance hall he was walking almost normally, with only a slight, stiff limp.

Lynsey was in the lead, striding out as fast as Snape could follow her, but when she came through the door into the echoing hall she stopped dead, so suddenly that Neville walked into her. It looked as if virtually every guard in the place - a couple of dozen, at the least - had come to see the rare spectacle of a prisoner being released before his term. Some seemed merely curious; but the expression on most of their faces was sullenly hostile - a gauntlet of cold eyes and scornful smiles that Snape would have to run if he wanted to get to the door.

Behind her, she heard him say quietly to Lupin "Give me your wand." She looked round in time to see Lupin comply, though he eyed Snape warily as he handed it over.

Snape glared at the assembled prison staff with an expression of fierce hatred. Gesturing sharply with the wand, he snapped "If they would be silent, let them stay silent." He strode towards them, a savage expression on his face and his robes billowing like dark sails, like boiling black clouds, and they fell back before him clutching their throats and moaning incoherently as he flung open the final door and stormed through it into the sunlight.

"What - what did you do to them?" Lynsey chattered, struggling to keep up as he marched towards the tiny dock - though she hardly dared ask.

"Psalm One Hundred and Thirty-Seven, Verse Six."

"Hey, I'm a pagan, remember? You'll have to explain."

"Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

"Arrgh."

"It will be an interesting exercise in non-verbal magic for them. Oh, don't worry," he said with a sideways, glittering look: "in a few days I'll tell someone from St Mungo's to check up on them - in case they haven't sorted it out for themselves by then."

* * *

**Author's note:**

The Bass Rock is an island in the mouth of the Firth of Forth, on which there are the ruins of a late Mediaeval castle which was used as a political prison during the 17th Century. It is a famous site for both bird-watching and seal-watching.

The name of Luna's dad has been changed to comply with the new canon backstory in _Deathly Hallows_.


	8. 07 Many Happy Returns

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**7: MANY HAPPY RETURNS**  
((_In which Snape is once more footloose, if not quite fancy free._)) 

If they struck out at once for the mainland they would reach harbour not much before midnight, which would make finding a room impossible; yet they had no desire to linger near Azkaban for any longer than they could help. They told the crew, therefore, that they wished to head for the Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland, so that Lupin could paint there in the morning, and the skipper just nodded, looking puzzled and a trifle cross-eyed. Quite apart from the issue of Snape's safety, the sooner they got the crew out of sight of Azkaban, and could lift the glamour which prevented them from seeing it properly, the better. Lynsey just hoped they could see it well enough not to crash into it.

Snape himself was in a wild mood. He almost fell as he stepped onto the boat, and was prickly and grudging about being saved by Lupin's fast grab for his elbow; but as soon as they reached the comparative privacy of the forecastle he picked Dobby up by the armpits like a child and swung him up onto a bunk at eye-level.

"You!" he said with a choking laugh. "Elf. Ask me anything - anything at all - and if it's within my powers I'll give it to you. What do you want - the latest thing in kitchen equipment? Your own tiny little cable-knit sweater?"

Dobby looked back at him gravely - possibly wondering whether it was ethical to take advantage of someone who was teetering on the edge of hysteria. "Does Master Severus really mean that?"

"Of course I bloody mean it. I wouldn't say it if I didn't bloody mean it, would I?"

The elf flicked his ears back and forth uneasily. "Dobby does not know. But what Dobby wants - " He hesitated.

"Well - out with it, then."

"A cable-knit sweater would be nice, oh yes," he said, blinking his glowing eyes. "But what Dobby really wants is for you to be nicer to Harry Potter."

"Damn," said Snape, sobering up on the spot. "I did promise, did I?"

"Yes" Lupin confirmed, with a huge and slightly toothy grin. "You did."

"Damn." He sat down abruptly on one of the bunks, and a visible tremor began in his thighs and spread until it left him sitting with his shoulders slumped and his head bowed, racked by shivers. His hands wrung themselves together of their own accord, even when Lynsey stood next to him and, greatly daring, laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.

Harry drifted off without a word, and soon clattering noises could be heard coming from the galley. Neville sat down on the deck at Snape's feet, composed and motherly, and took Snape's hands in his own and began to rub ointment into them again, gently cleaning and salving the raw, oozing area where the first manacle had galled his skin, and smoothing over the tight grooves where the handcuffs had dug into him. His patient sat quietly, his face obscured by a curtain of matted hair, and let the boy do what he would.

"I'm sorry", Neville said sadly, looking at the angry red lines around Snape's wrists; " - sorry the blanket got you into trouble."

Snape lifted his head then and looked back at him, and his mouth tightened dryly. "It was a competent piece of work, Longbottom. It was only ill-chance that the stupid woman happened to fall against it."

"Thank you sir!" Neville exclaimed, beaming as if he'd just been given a medal. Even as he spoke, Harry ducked his head and entered the forecastle, smiling a wry and secret smile and carrying a tray laden with a full fry-up breakfast containing enough cholesterol to stop a rhinoceros, and a huge mug of treacly black coffee.

"There's more for you lot in the galley" he muttered, with a vague gesture of his head towards the open door. "Here you are - sir. You, uh, look as if you could do with a bit of feeding up."

Snape bared his teeth at the boy in automatic resentment, although it didn't put him off accepting the tray. "When I want charity, Potter - " Dobby cleared his throat in a meaningful way, and Snape bit off what he had been going to say with a visible effort. "Breakfast, however, is another matter. I - your cooking appears to be adequate."

As Neville and Lupin bustled off to fetch food for the rest of them, Snape applied himself diligently to scrambled egg, black pudding, bacon, fried tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms and scalding hot coffee, and Harry folded himself down gracefully to the floor. Lynsey saw him glance at Dobby, and distinctly heard him murmur to himself "Oh, this is going to be fun."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

After breakfast, Snape stretched out quietly on the narrow bunk and lay dozing, half asleep and half awake, gazing at the sea through one of the ship's tiny portholes. Lynsey fetched a blanket and tucked it round him, and he gave her a quick flash of a smile. As Azkaban faded altogether from view she thought that he felt like weeping, and yet her sense of him said that he was, for once in his life, deeply happy.

As _Marjorie's Fancy_ purred her way across the water the weather came on stormy and grey, and Snape began to look progressively less happy and more green. He wasn't the only poor sailor on the boat; both Neville and Lupin were already taking something they swore was called Ocean Motion Potion, and Lupin was happy to share. Snape twitched the end of his long nose like an opossum and swore the product was substandard and contained too little ginger, but he drank it anyway, and was soon back to looking merely yellowish and unwell instead of green and ghastly.

The boat was now more than crowded, but Harry and Ron could hardly leave on their brooms without confusing the crew even more. They joined Neville in the galley to "help" cook lunch and get hilariously in each other's way, while Lupin lounged on a bunk himself and pretended to be asleep. Officially he was still convalescing from his transformation the previous week, but in reality Lynsey suspected he just wanted to keep an eye on Snape, in case there were any unexpected problems, either magical or medical.

Lynsey hardly liked to let him out of her sight herself, even to visit the head. She had had Neville bring her breakfast to her on the forecastle, so she could stay with her professor, and after the business with the seasickness potion she sat herself down quietly on the floor with her back to him and leaned back against the edge of the bunk where he lay dozing. After a while he shifted softly and draped his long hand across her shoulder, and she put up her own hand to cover his.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They had been resting peacefully like that for some time and Lynsey had almost dozed off herself, relief leaving her limp as an unstrung puppet even though her position was not an entirely comfortable one, when she heard muttered voices through the partly open door. They sounded as if they were trying not to be overheard; but if so they were making a pig's ear of it.

"You never bloody bought robes like that for _me_" muttered Ron's unmistakeable, sullen voice. "I mean, God, nothing but the best quality for our dear professor. _Silk_."

"Yes, well, I didn't want to embarrass you, or I would've," Harry's softer tones replied.

"But you bought them for Snape!"

"And your point is...?"

Lynsey felt the professor's hand twitch under her own, ever-so slightly, and realized that he was awake. She turned to look at him, wondering if he would be angry or embarrassed at what they had just heard, but he gave her a cool, glittering look and quirked a sardonic eyebrow. Gazing at his bony face from only a few inches away, she smiled at him, and he gazed back, suddenly grave, his black eyes holding hers.

He put his hand up and touched the corner of her eye, very gently, and then shivered as if the cold had bitten him to the bone. "No one would look me in the eye," he said quietly; then his lips quirked slightly. "Well - no-one except Dobby, so I suppose I got - got extra rations, with eyes that size. You'd think, looking Dobby in the eyes would equate to at least four humans..."

Lynsey glanced away, briefly embarrassed, ran her thumb lightly over the abrasions which braceleted his wrist, and then looked back, holding his gaze steadily this time. "We would never have left you there, you know," she replied, equally quietly. "If the sentence hadn't been so - heinous I suppose Minerva might have put you on hold for a few months while she sorted out the war, but she would never have deserted you long-term - and as it was we just couldn't leave you a day longer than we could help."

Later on, they all collected together in the forecastle and lounged around playing cards. Harry proved to be an unexpectedly vicious and astute player, and cleaned out the pot.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

And in the morning - another massive fry-up breakfast, which Snape ploughed through with the dedication of one determined to overcome an obstacle, and then the Farne Islands in the grey light of dawn. Chugging companionably to itself, the little boat rounded Northern Hares and then held position off Big Harcar, the island to which Grace Darling and her father had once rowed three quarters of a mile from the Longstone Lighthouse in violent storm, to save nine shipwrecked sailors. Lupin allayed suspicion by turning out a very reasonable watercolour sketch of the steep-sided island, while Lynsey showed Snape the nearly-finished sycamore wand.

Lynsey watched him as he turned the white wood over and over in his hands, his expression unreadable, and then called his tame lightning into the rod with a silent flick of his wrist. "They say the wand should fit the wielder, perfectly," he said, still sounding rather subdued. "My wand - my _old_ wand - it was someone else's before me, and my parents chose it for me because it was all they could afford, and it would do." He sighed and pointed the wand at a drinking glass, which blew apart into shards. "My mother gave it to me in duty and my father gave it me in rage, and duty and rage and making do with things that don't really suit me have defined me ever since. It will be nice to have a wand which is meant for me alone, and which is informed by skill and care and friendship." Another subtle flick, and the glass was whole again.

Avoiding the lethally strong current through Piper Gut, they took the safer passage through Middin Gut and swung round south and west in a great curve, passing close by Inner Farne _en route_ to Bamburgh, where the boat was to put them ashore. The green rolling slopes leading up to St Cuthbert's Chapel were wholly inviting, even in such grey weather, but Snape was desperate to get ashore and have a proper bath and they left the island unvisited. They could always come back out later on one of the little tour boats, if time permitted.

They arrived in Bamburgh at about eleven a.m., and took their leave of the crew rather awkwardly. They hadn't really had a chance to get to know them properly, since they themselves had too much to hide, and the men had of necessity spent much of the voyage in a magically-induced daze. They looked happy to be rid of their paying passengers, anyway, and Lynsey supposed the Gothy one had told the others that they were Excisemen. Harry looked even happier to get shot of them, since it meant he was no longer haemorrhaging cash.

As they walked up through the town Snape moved like a man in a dream, staring around him at the immense, towering castle on the rock, the stand of trees at the heart of the village and all the old-fashioned little shops and houses. In their turn, the villagers stared back. Dobby at least had made himself scarce, which was probably just as well, but Snape himself was quite odd enough to be getting on with - a tall, white-faced, bone-thin man in an academic gown, his face and arms marred by fading bruises, his long hair matted and clogged with salt.

It was fortunate that the guest house which Minerva McGonagall had booked them into had two bathrooms, since they all wanted at least to shower and rinse the salt out of their hair, and Snape seemed determined to spend most of the afternoon in the bath. Lynsey told the landlady that the big husky she and Neville had had with them last week was staying with friends which, again, was nearly not a lie, and took the opportunity to put the finishing touches to the sycamore wand. When it was done, Neville spelled it so that the criss-crossing net of wire which laced the handle fused into one piece with the straight silver core.

Minerva herself joined them mid afternoon and Snape finally emerged from his ablutions, scrubbed to within an inch of his life and still looking curiously subdued. Minerva embraced him without a word, her eyes misty behind their severe, square-cut glasses. He leaned against her as if he might fall and she murmured quiet, loving nonsense to him.

He had done his best with his hair, which was now at least clean and free from salt, but it was still very matted. Lynsey lent him her disentangling comb, and he raked it viciously through the knots until he got them into some sort of order. Afterwards they went out, all of them, to eat at a local restaurant. Lynsey had the impression that Minerva was deliberately easing the professor back into his freedom gradually, giving him the chance to steady his nerves before he rejoined the clamour and complications of the Order.

Sitting in a restaurant, she thought, quietly eating good food and drinking good wine, was the best thing for him at the moment; a bubble of peace and civility floating above the turmoil of the last few months. The man looked tired to death; which was not surprizing considering that in almost ten weeks there had been only five days (counting today and yesterday) during which he had not either been being tortured, in one sense or another, or on trial, or on the run; and less than three weeks during which he had had anything like enough to eat.

Currently, Minerva - who seemed to have been a bit of a goer in her wartime youth, to judge from some of her comments - was regaling him with the juicier tidbits from her surveillance of the Minister. Lynsey distinctly heard him exclaim "You're kidding!" more than once - and the three boys were all obviously straining to hear more, whilst pretending disinterest.

By the time they had progressed to dessert, Snape seemed a lot perkier; evidently a bit of spiteful gossip did him the world of good. He lounged back, twirling a glass of wine in his long fingers, and murmured, in a fair imitation of the Headmistress's dry Scottish voice, "Does your brother know that you're shagging his wife, Minister? Would you like him to know?" He took a healthy swig from the glass and added, in his own voice, "That is _priceless_, Minerva - but how on earth did you get the Skeeter monstrosity to agree to publish?" Lynsey saw Harry grin at hearing the journalist miscalled, and wondered what that was about.

Minerva coughed, delicately. "It would seem that Ms Skeeter is an unregistered Animagus." This time it was Lupin who flushed, and Lynsey wondered what that was about, too. "Hermione Granger apparently found out about this during her fourth year and has been using the knowledge to - ah, _influence_ Ms Skeeter."

"Ha. So the very prim-and-proper Miss Granger resorted to a little light blackmail and put an intellectual half-nelson on the First Lady of Libel - how very... _Slytherin_ of her. And there's no need to bristle, Potter," he added without looking round; "I mean it as a compliment." He turned to Lynsey then, his eyes sunken in and smudged by shadow but glittering with malicious amusement. "Somebody else I hear was being quite Slytherin; Lupin tells me you were smarming round that _bastard_ Heggarty, trying to get him to be - nicer to me, or something equally improbable."

Lynsey looked back at him soberly. "Did it work?"

"Somewhat. He wasn't quite so - so rough, towards the end."

"Good. I might keep in touch with him - Christmas cards and so on - do you people send Christmas cards? You never know when a contact like that might come in handy; though I feel a bit guilty - "

"Don't be. He doesn't deserve - " The shutters came over his face again for a moment, and he sighed and put the glass back on the table with an audible click. "I should be - all of you - I hate to say it but you've all been..."

"That's all right," Lupin said with a grin. "We won't hold you to actually saying it - will we Harry?"

"No, of course not," Harry said virtuously, and Snape shot him a poisonous glare. "I'm just glad," the boy added, "that in the end I didn't have to kiss up to old Scrimgeour and pretend to be his Ministry poster-boy just to get you out."

"Harry Potter having to be polite to somebody for once," Snape said silkily; "now _there's_ an image to conjure with."

"Hey," Ron said, without much rancour, "he can report you to Dobby now if you're nasty to him."

"Was I being nasty to you, Potter?" Snape said, raising his eyebrows. "I thought I was merely - making an observation."

Harry looked back at him levelly and pursed his lips in that same small, secret smile. "I wouldn't have been very good at it, anyway."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They slept the night at the guest house and Lynsey, with her extra awareness of the man, could feel her professor's exhausted, incredulous relief as he sank into the embrace of a proper mattress. And then, in the morning, they went their separate ways. Minerva, Neville, the professor and Ron were all leaving together; Snape having been invited to stay with Ron's parents, since his own house was no longer secure and his bank balance, such as it was, was still impounded by the Ministry.

Lupin stayed behind for the afternoon, having really got into the painting thing, and wanting to take a tourist boat out to Inner Farne, even though they were few and far between in February. Harry stayed to keep him company, since Lupin seemed to be a special friend of his; and Lynsey stayed because when she finally parted from them, this strange _cul-de-sac_ in her life would be at an end, it would close over - her life would get back onto its normal track and it would be as though all of them, even the professor, were just a dream she had had. So she hung around, feeling scraped-thin and despondent, and went out to the island with them and had a look at St. Cuthbert's Chapel, and then made desultory conversation while Lupin painted.

She declined Lupin's offer to Apparate her to St. Andrew's, feeling somehow that that would be pathetic, to cling on to the last trailing shadow of the wizarding world to that extent, and the forty-minute bus-ride to Berwick and then two hours on the train would give her a chance to adjust; to shake off the wonder and strangeness of the past two months, a little, and remember whom she used to be.

Besides, she had always loved the stretch of line just north of Berwick, where the train clung to the edge of the cliff, and one could look out of the carriage almost straight down into the sea.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She was back home and trying to persuade the cats that they knew her by nine p.m., and all the world seemed horribly empty. She had to resist the temptation to 'phone her professor at once to see if he had arrived safely; he would surely want some time to settle in. But that was, at least, one blessing: that The Burrow had a working 'phone. And surely she would see the professor again in March, anyway, to go to the Runrig concert.

Why was it that now that he was free, and safe (after a fashion), she still dreamed about him trapped and despairing in the white room? By the next day, Friday the 20th, she was climbing the walls. She needed to settle, to finish the website she'd been working on on the boat, and it ought to be so much easier now that she had access to the tower PC again instead of just the laptop - but the restless feeling of dislocation made it impossible to focus. By mid afternoon she gave in to temptation and called the professor.

A relentlessly gungho-sounding woman with a slight trace of an Irish accent answered the 'phone, and could be heard shouting for "Severus." When his familiar smooth, slightly insinuating voice came curling down the line Lynsey felt faint with relief; he was real, he was still there, the wizarding world itself was somehow still out there at the other end of the wire, and hadn't nipped off from her own and gone floating off, balloon-like, to where she would never find it.

"You arrived all right, then... How are you feeling?" she asked, wishing she could think of something more original to say.

"I am tolerably well," the rich voice replied. "Molly and Arthur have been very welcoming - although I wish Molly would stop treating me as if I was five years old."

Lynsey distinctly heard the woman's voice say "I heard that, young man." She didn't have to see the professor to know that he was rolling his eyes.

"And - the wand?"

"So far, it seems to perform very well."

She fell into a pattern of calling him every couple of days, on any pretext or on none. Once, he asked her in an odd voice "Why do you keep on 'phoning me?" For a moment she was poised on the edge of being shattered, of being cast down - but he hadn't sounded hostile, and she knew how hostile he could get. She asked him carefully if he wanted her to stop.

"No - no, of course not," he said, sounding frustrated, and she was reassured; it was hardly likely, in his case, that he was just being polite. "But - why?"

"I told you," she said. "I like talking to you. I like you."

He gave a soft huff of laughter. "Then I should be glad that you have - peculiar tastes. Arthur and Molly - they're good people, and although I wouldn't say it to them I am more than grateful for their hospitality, especially when... But Molly tends to talk at you, not to you, and Arthur wants me to explain how washing machines work. As if I'd know. I left the Muggle world more than twenty years ago - and my family didn't even have an indoor lavvie!"

The following day, he actually 'phoned her - wanting, he said, "an excuse to get away from the madhouse for a bit. It's noisy enough," he said glumly, "when it's only Molly and Arthur and the two young ones and the goddamned ghoul and the chickens, although Potter and Granger are here half the time as well. At least Granger talks about things that are interesting, even if she can't keep her mouth closed for two minutes together. But it's Ronald's eighteenth the day after tomorrow, and since it's the first birthday he's been at home for since he was eleven and nobody knows who'll still be alive this time next year, the whole bloody family is filing in early for the celebrations - including Fleur. Except Percy, of course, and he was the only one who didn't live his entire life at screaming-pitch."

A few days later when she spoke to him he seemed tired and discontented. "It isn't," he said, "that they aren't welcoming; Arthur especially has been the soul of kindness. But I'm not sure that kindness is... I'm not a bloody invalid. And the younger ones... the twins remind me altogether too much of James and Sirius, except that they are more overtly criminal; and I may have achieved some kind of uneasy truce with Potter, but Ronald Weasley's dislike of me is palpable. He's making a valiant effort to tolerate me because he feels sorry for me, for pity's sake - and I suppose it is for pity's sake, but I detest being an object of pity - but I can see the strain in him every time I open my mouth, and he's going to be just joyous tonight when I turn up as the bloody spectre at his birthday feast. And I know Molly won't let me just sit it out."

"It sounds like it's putting quite a strain on you."

"Yes. But I - I don't really want to be on my own, at present. Not after - "

"Yes."

"Also, loathe as I am to admit it I'm still quite physically weak, and likely to remain so for some time. I suppose I could ask Minerva - or even Lupin, God forbid - if they could put me up for a few weeks; but I don't like having to go to them cap in hand like a bloody beggar."

"You could always come here," Lynsey heard her own voice say, although she wasn't consciously aware of having intended to speak, and the words came out in an awkward rush. "You could always come and stay with me."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Piper Gut and Middin Gut are channels which separate Big Harcar from the islands to either side of it; Piper Gut has notoriously strong currents.

An Exciseman is somebody who works for the Department of Customs and Excise.

A half nelson is a wrestling hold, also used as a general slang term for backing someone into a corner.


	9. 08 A Shore Thing

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**8: A SHORE THING**  
((_In which domesticity occurs._))

There was one thing to be said for Apparition; it might be uncomfortable, disorienting and disturbing, but it was certainly quick. The main delaying factor was the necessity for the professor to contact Remus Lupin and get the password ("erythematosus") which would get him through the wards which Lupin had put on Lynsey's flat. That being done, in little more time than it must have taken him to pack he was standing rather diffidently in Lynsey's living-room, clutching a threadbare old-fashioned carpet bag which had definitely seen better days. Against the fashionable off-white of the walls he looked like a crow in a snowfield.

They eyed each other cautiously, from a distance. Lynsey gazed openly at Snape, who ducked his head aside and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "Are you certain about this?" he asked, trying and failing to sound offhand.

He had been concerned that his mere presence would put Lynsey in grave danger; until Minerva had pointed out briskly that she was in grave danger anyway. A Muggle who had helped The Traitor to escape... simply being with him could hardly make her more of a target.

"Quite certain; you're very welcome." He still looked exhausted and rather unwell, although at least the bruises were gone, and the sore on his wrist was nearly so. "Make yourself comfortable pet, do - you look all in."

Snape folded down onto the sofa with a grateful sigh and let his head flop back. "I don't know which was worse," he said with his eyes shut, one long black-clad arm draped along the back of the sofa; "Molly's incessant chivvying 'for my own good', or the damned mirror constantly telling me to tidy myself up and get a haircut."

She had thought about preparing trout for him - a sentimental reminder of that strange night in the woods - but she didn't want to disturb or embarrass him by appearing to try too hard, so she had made a risotto instead. At first Snape ate as if he thought someone might take it away from him, but by the second helping and the third glass of wine he had settled down a bit. "I suppose," he said, picking a stray prawn off his sleeve, "that I will have to buy some Muggle clothes tomorrow - you'll have to help me, since my knowledge of Muggle fashion is twenty years out of date."

"You can if you want to - and I'd be happy to help - but it's not mandatory. That's one of the great things about St Andrews."

"Oh?"

"Mmm. Anywhere else, and dressing like a pre-Raphaelite monk would attract attention; but wearing academic gowns in the street is something of a tradition with the university here. St Andrews' own robes are scarlet - but people will just think you're a visiting lecturer from some college with a rather Gothic sense of style. Used to be, some of the shops would give you a discount if you were in a gown, but I'm not sure if that's still true."

"It would be - useful if they did."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They had considered fleeing the country, hiding - but all routes in and out of Britain were likely to be being watched. There was no reason to think the Death Eaters knew where Lynsey lived, or even in which country, other than "probably in Britain" - that information had not been on any of the leaflets for the Solstice Moot - and it would take them a long time to work through every L. O'Connor in the 'phone book. Even had she been in the 'phone book, which she was not. Nor did they know what kind of work she did, and in any case she traded under a business name.

So it was unlikely that the Death Eaters, who despized all Muggle technology, would be able to find her; and if they did, she was probably safer with Snape than without him. The running battle through Chislehurst Caves could only enhance his already formidable reputation, and make the Death Eaters more reluctant to tangle with him. The Unnameable One was unlikely to send his minions after him unless he was fairly sure they would succeed; since if he tried and failed it would make him look like an idiot. And first they would have to find him. It was true that a man called Karkaroff had fled the Death Eaters and had been caught and killed in just over a year - but Karkaroff had still been Marked.

Nevertheless, the Order was going for the belt-and-braces approach. As well as comprehensive wards on the flat itself, and on the stair on which it sat, there was somebody watching the house at all times, whether they were in or out of it; and if one of them went out, another Order member tailed them. On top of that, they were both shielded by something called a Boring Charm - the magical equivalent of a psychic effect which Lynsey knew as a "Someone Else's Problem Field", which made anybody outside their immediate circle who started to notice them forget them again within a few seconds.

On top of that, if they went out Snape wore a glamour, to make him look less strikingly like himself, although Lynsey - who rather liked his beaky prow of a face - found that disappointing; and he was braced to Apparate them both away from danger at any time. And Hermione Granger, apparently, was brewing a fresh batch of a very slow, complex potion which could, if required, make them both look like someone else altogether.

Minerva, it seemed, was taking no chances of Severus being re-taken.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Lynsey wondered if they would find themselves with nothing to talk about, now that they were no longer actually running for their lives together; but Severus was not somebody who needed to talk all the time, and when he did talk, it was always worth hearing. He was, she found, quite a restful companion, despite his sharp tongue; he did not, as so many other male friends had done, start feeling neurotic and neglected if she spent too much time on the computer, and demand she pay him attention.

She wasn't quite sure whether that was a virtue or a symptom. Despite his spectacular flare of force and spirit in the leaving of Azkaban he was still tired and unwell, not fully recovered either from the torture or the pneumonia, and the restraining wards of the prison had drained his psychic and magical energy. The second morning after he arrived she chanced to see him emerge blearily from the bathroom, half-asleep and half-clothed, and she was shocked to see how painfully thin he still was. The man looked like a skinned rabbit, despite ten days of Molly Weasley's home cooking.

She didn't want to annoy him or make him feel weaker by fussing over him too openly, so she fretted about him in private. In other respects he was easy company, so long as you didn't pester him with too many silly questions - quiet, reasonably tidy for a bachelor and a surprizingly good, if eccentric, cook, and at least he had the sense to ask if he didn't know how some piece of Muggle household equipment worked. And the cats liked him, which was always a good sign.

So when she returned from a business meeting to find him sitting on the sofa, staring down at his own hands with a tight, queasy expression, shivering slightly and apparently oblivious to Nestor kneading a hole in the cloth which covered his thigh, she made him a mug of hot chocolate without being asked and sat down quietly for him to tell her about it, or not, as he pleased. It was, after all, only two weeks since he had been manacled in a freezing damp cell, a month since he had believed that he was to be completely isolated for the rest of his miserable life - and a little over two months since he had been twisting and howling in the grip of the Dark One's torturers. It was small wonder if he was still very shaken and sore, both physically and mentally.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

You would have thought that having a guest there would be a distraction; but now that she had the professor under her eye where she could worry about him in peace, she found she was able to finish the project she'd been working on and start another; just as well, really, since she needed the money, especially with two mouths to feed. Severus insisted on paying his own way as far as he was able, but his house had been seized and sold after Dumbledore's apparent murder, and his meagre savings were still impounded by the state, even though the bank (goblin-run, she gathered) wouldn't physically hand them over without his say-so.

He could hardly seek paid employment in any normal wizarding job, considering that he was now one of the Death Eaters' prime targets. All he had was three weeks' salary which had been owing to him at the end of the previous year, when his and Dumbledore's spying operation went pear-shaped, and which Minerva had insisted on paying him out of the school's emergency funds. She had tried to get him to accept a stipend for his work as an Order member, but Lynsey gathered he had refused vehemently - seeing it, probably correctly, as charity, since no other Order member was paid.

Since the post at Hogwarts had included bed-and-board all found, the cash element was distinctly underwhelming. It was enough to pay for his share of the food, for a few weeks, and to buy a couple of changes of clothes if he was not too extravagant, and that was almost the end of it. What was left went on a child-sized pullover, knitted in Orkney and covered in fine patterns in the natural creams, greys and browns of undyed wool.

"You trying to bribe him into dropping the 'be nice to Harry' clause?" Lynsey asked with a grin.

"Would I do such a thing?"

"Well, would you?"

"Absolutely - if I thought it would do any good."

Afterwards they wandered down Market Street, past the covered fountain, and took a right-and-left under the archway which led into the ruined cathedral. Standing in the open, grass-covered court which had once been the nave, Severus gazed up quietly at the massive, unsupported lacework of stone which was all that remained of the east end of a once-great hall of worship, with the oblong column of the twelfth century tower of St Rule to the right of it and only the sea and sky behind it. Lynsey looked at him under her eyelashes, surreptitiously watching his long hair ruffle and flutter in the salt wind from the sea.

Passing beyond the cathedral, they stood within the faint cruciform outline of the ancient Culdean church of St Mary-on-the-Crag, still just visible through the short turf. Snape's robes whipped around him, billowing impressively and making him look as though he had just stepped through a window in time, although Lynsey privately thought that her own leather jacket and jeans were a lot less draughty.

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed the rangy grey tabby pacing across the springy turf, close enough to observe them and too far away to be caught by anyone who might attack them. As she watched, someone stooped to pet it, and the cat arched its back and flaunted its whiskers without taking its eyes off them.

Below them, the long rib-bone of the harbour wall extended into the North Sea, its strong curve made irregular and curiously organic-looking by age and rough weather. "That's where we were sitting - down there," she said, "on the wall along the back - when Harry had his brain-wave about using Dobby to reach you."

"On the _wall_?" Severus looked at the slumped, meandering stonework rather dubiously, and she remembered that he was, if possible, even more scared of heights than she was. "You mean that - narrow thing, along the seaward side there?"

"Uh-huh." The harbour wall was divided into two levels. There was a broad, level walkway perhaps twelve feet wide, and then along the edge of that foot-way, between it and the open sea, a higher, rather battered wall which kept the wind off the causeway proper.

At the landward end this outer wall was about five foot wide and less than hip-high and one could easily clamber up onto it, and could walk along it fairly safely, despite its pitted surface. If you did walk it, though, you found that it inclined gently upwards; the further out to sea you went, the higher you were above the walkway, until you were about six feet up.

Towards the far end, where it was already much too far out to sea for comfort, a couple of broad steps took the wall up higher still, until by the end it was ten or twelve feet above the causeway. Worse, although this higher stretch of wall was more modern than the low end, and the stonework underfoot was much more even, it was also far narrower; perhaps thirty inches across. There was no railing except the one around the stair which took you back down to the walkway at the far end, and nothing on the other side of the wall but a long drop onto rocks, or into the North Sea, depending on where the tide was.

"Is that - quite safe?"

"It's worse than that: it's traditional for students to walk the wall at least once during their stay here. That is - a lot of students stroll out along the causeway on a Sunday, in gowns, but you're supposed to walk the higher bit at the back at least once."

"Did you?"

"Oh yes. Somebody told me that girls were allowed to stay on the path where it was safe and didn't have to do the wall-walk, so of course I did. It was windy, too; the boys all chickened out and jumped down before it got too high, and left just me and another girl." She smiled reminiscently. "I've rarely been so bloody scared in my life."

"Then I shall walk it, definitely - but not when it's windy, and not just yet. I'm still not entirely steady on my feet, and there is a difference between brave and stupid - even though you would have trouble convincing a Gryffindor of that."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Explain to me how this works," he said, peering at the screen and trying to pretend he hadn't just grabbed at the back of her chair to keep himself from falling.

'Oh, Lor' - you couldn't ask me something simpler, like the meaning of life, death, the universe and everything?"

"Forty-two," he replied promptly, and folded down onto the sofa in a billow of robes.

"But of course. Well... you finally left the normal - sorry, the Muggle - world when, about?"

"Nineteen seventy-eightish. Up to that point, I was still spending part of each year as a Muggle. After that - well, I still took an interest in Muggle literature and music, but I didn't have much to do with their everyday life any more."

"All right, so - do you remember the early programmable pocket calculators?"

"Merlin, that takes me back. I had a Sinclair Cambridge - it was very useful for working out proportions for potion ingredients, but I couldn't use it at Hogwarts because the standing magical field - What's funny about that?" he added, scowling.

"Oh - just - you doing something so techno-nerdish as buying the latest electronic toy." Severus coughed delicately. "What?"

"I didn't - exactly _buy_ it. I was, um, 'going through a phase'."

"Hah. Well, if you remember anything about those machines, you'll understand... you can set it to do things, the way you could set the Cambridge only much, much more complex. The instructions are couched in binary - complex patterns of ones and zeros..."

"Calculations in base two?"

"_Bas_ically. The ones and zeros are stored as little - marks, little magnetic blips, on a disc made of stuff which is basically the same as what you make a cassette tape out of, and the pattern of blips tells the machine how to do things, and you can change the blips - and hence what it does - either by typing changes in or by copying them from another sort of disc."

"So when you are working you are - changing the blips?"

"Sort of. Web-design - what I'm mostly doing - that's mainly just entering commands which cause information to be displayed in particular ways - 'put this bit in italics'; 'centre this' and so on. But when I'm doing - thing called Java - then I'm programming, and that's like - do you know what automata are? Mechanical toys which you wind up and they run through a complex sequence of actions?"

"Oh, yes. I saw some at Blackpool when I was a child - there was one I remember with trains which ran in and out of a shed. My mother was in a good mood for once, and she gave me 10p to make it go. I thought it was - hah. 'Like magic'."

"It's not, though."

"Well - not usually, but - I wanted so much to see it again, and Mums wouldn't give me another coin and I - well, I looked at it, wanting it to go again, and it did go. Hardly a very impressive introduction to magic; I don't think I even moved the trains themselves, just - tripped the little lever that the coin would have tripped."

"Even so... wow. You have no idea, do you, how _rare_ telekinesis is? Even minor telekinesis."

"Is it?" He shifted position slightly, with a very faint hint of preening self-congratulation which made Lynsey grin. "So how does this - peasy..."

"PC. Short for Personal Computer."

"Yes. That. How is it related to automata?"

"Well, it's just that, people who make automata... you have all these odd-shaped little levers and gears and cogs which are set so that when _this_ creeps to a certain point along _that_ bar then something else clicks into position, and that starts something else moving... Programming, writing the code, the - the instructions which make the PC do certain things, is like that, except instead of physical cogs and gears you use a special set of words called a programming language to describe what you want to happen.

"So it'll say, maybe, 'keep on doing this, add one each time you do it, and when you've got one more than the number you first thought of, do something else' - only in special language - and you bolt a whole string of basically quite simple 'if this then this' commands like that together, and with them you can make the system do really complex things. And the logic, the type of thought-process you need to see how to make it all fit together, is very much the same as the logic that sees how to make the little cogs and gears interact to make a doll smoke a cigar. Or trains run in and out of a shed."

"And could you, do you think, teach me how to do this?"

She considered him for a moment - inventive, original, his clever face alight with interest. "Yes - I would think so."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

On the fifth day, he left her - not for good, or for ill, but just to attend an Order meeting. She was fairly glad not to have been asked to accompany him; much as she liked most of his co-conspirators, the crushing, wringing sensation of Apparition was one she could well live without.

When he came back, some six hours later, he looked grey with exhaustion, and Lupin and Harry were with him - ostensibly to pay a social call but in practice, she thought, to make sure he got home in one piece (literally). They popped into existence in mid-argument.

"No!" Severus snapped sharply, before Lynsey's ears had quite stopped ringing from the triple bang of their arrival. "Nobody else is paid just for attending, and I'm not a - a bloody invalid, that should be paid a pension."

"Well, call it a loan, then - " Lupin began.

"Would _you_ take a loan from the Order? God knows, you dress badly enough - "

"I know I'd never be able to pay it back - and at least I can re-stock the freezer by hunting if I have to. You would be able to repay it, when the Ministry gets round to unfreezing your assets."

"You mean 'if', Lupin - _if_ the damned Ministry unfreezes my assets, not 'when'."

Harry coughed. "How would it be if I - if the Order paid you to tutor us - I mean me, Ron, Hermione, all the junior members - in practical Defence Against the Dark Arts? When you've recovered a bit."

Severus gave him a sour look. "I thought you were the one who was supposed to be the brilliant, natural DADA teacher, Potter - according to your fan-club."

"I wasn't bad," Harry admittedly cheerfully. "Better than Umbridge, anyway."

"That's no great claim; there are things living under rocks which could teach Defence better than darling Dolores."

"Yes, quite, so I didn't have to be brilliant or - or arrogant or anything to think that I could do it better, did I? I just think that now - well, with going after the you-know-whats and everything, we could do with being taught by somebody with real field experience."

"Good God - do you know what you'd be letting yourself in for?"

"Oh yes - worse luck. But I've come to realize that as far as your students are concerned you're all bark and no bite."

"You are confusing me with Lupin here - I do not bark. May I remind you that I once threw a jar at your head?"

"Yeah - but if you'd meant it to hit me, it would have, wouldn't it? We could start up Dumbledore's Army again and you could teach us properly - I don't know anyone better qualified to do it."

"If Longbottom is involved, I get extra money."

They had brought several issues of the _Daily Prophet_ with them, since Severus didn't want to attract attention by having owls delivering to Lynsey's flat. She had seen some moving photographs during her stay with the Order in the Lake District, but they still astonished her - not so much the movement itself, but how interactive they were. Minister Scrimgeour was looking distinctly peaky and reared back when he noticed her, looking hunted; and there was an article on one of the inside pages about the Ministry still not having released _Exonerated War Hero Severus Snape_'s bank account. Severus himself curled his lip at it, and muttered "Amazing what a little blackmail will do."

"What I don't get," Lynsey said, reading over his shoulder, "is, OK, Hermione bullied Rita Skeeter into writing the article, but how did they get her editor to agree to print it? If Scrimgeour was leaning on them..."

"Oh, the editor is one of Horace Slughorn's little pets. Horace just leant on him the other way - and he has a lot more weight."

"I don't like Slughorn much," Harry muttered.

"And why would that be, Potter? Do tell. Apart from the mere fact that he's a Slytherin."

"He's very - well, self-serving, isn't he? Sir. And a snob, and a bit of a racist."

"He is all those things, yes, and seven more besides. But he doted on your mother, despite his rather patronizing attitude to Muggle-borns, and he saw talent and worth in me when no-one else saw anything except a common little half-blood brat with no money or manners. And maybe he viewed us both as something he could _use_ - but at least he thought he could use us because he thought we both had some intrinsic value. Few pure-bloods with his sort of background would have deigned to look twice at either of us."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

On Sunday morning, the weather being surprizingly warm for March, Lupin popped through to be their extra backup, so that Lynsey could take Severus down to the shore again to watch the students in their gowns, promenading along the harbour wall. Neither of them liked to tie up an additional Order member unnecessarily; but Lupin happily gave up an hour or two of his free time, declaring that he wanted to paint the scene anyway. His preliminary sketch was disturbing, the scarlet robes seeming to float above the stone like a parade of Flanders poppies - but then, "disturbing" was probably what most people would expect from a picture painted by a werewolf.

He was actually wearing new robes, which Lynsey gathered was a first, and looked exceedingly pleased with himself; having sold three of his seascapes to a gallery in York, for a fairly good price considering that he was an unknown.

Afterwards Lynsey and Severus sat out in the little communal garden, which was warded as heavily as the rest of the stair. Hers was what is called in Scotland a "garden flat", meaning that the front of the flat was actually below ground, its windows opening onto a sunken "area", while the back door let onto a garden at a lower level than the street. Technically the garden was shared between eight households; but in practice Lynsey had most of the use of it.

Severus gazed down moodily at the half full glass of beer in his hand, not meeting Lynsey's eye. "I suppose," he said, "that now that Lupin has found himself a source of income which doesn't involve poaching, that makes me the poorest member of our little circle again - even if I had access to my savings, which I don't. You would think from the look of him that it would be Dung - but I hear crime pays quite well these days." He downed the rest of the beer in one swig, put the glass back on the tray with a decisive _click_ and leaned back on his elbow in the unkempt grass. "At least if I do tutor Potter and his Merry Morons I'll be able to pay my own way."

"That would be nice, but it isn't necessary."

"I think that it is; I have no wish to be a financial burden, as well as - "

"Tish. You're quiet, you're useful about the house and you're not a big eater - why would you be a burden?"

Severus favoured her with one of his trademark sour looks. "You make me sound like a well-behaved pet."

Lynsey smiled back at him. "Not a pet, except in terms of the endearment, and certainly not a well-behaved one; but I do take a - proprietary interest. I realized it when we were - when you sang _The Shaking of the Sheets_ to freak out Old Mouldy, and I could feel his mind trying to get at you through the Mark and I remembered Tam Lin and I found myself thinking 'Not yours, _mine_'."

He frowned at her, his black brows bowing like crow's wings. "I'm not sure I like the implications of that - you don't bloody own me."

"Different kind of 'mine.' Not possessive - possessed, perhaps, or protective, but not possessive. In one of Terry Pratchett's books, there's this, um, this talking dog who denies the possibility of having a master, but when a man he likes is injured and unconscious in the snow, the dog stands between him and the wolves, expecting to die, and barks 'Mine, mine!' And one of the wolves - one of the wolves is really a werewolf, and the man's lover, and she growls 'No, hmine!' Do you know who Oskar Schindler was?"

"No."

"Schindler was a German industrialist before the last war: a bully, a braggart and a crook, who treated his workforce like serfs, like property. But when the Nazis came to take away some of his workers to be starved and, and tortured and killed, because they were Jews, Schindler said 'Mine, mine!' and he used his bluster and his crooked dealing to save them. And then he said 'Mine, mine!' of his Jewish workers' families, and saved them as well."

She smiled at him, sensing something transcendent. "And then he started to think of all the Jewish prisoners of the Nazis as 'Mine, mine!' and saved hundreds more, because 'What I have I hold, and what I hold I care for.' It's not an owning-and-using sort of 'Mine' - more like a belonging to, or with. My friend, my country, my family's estate that I'm going to spend my life maintaining - that sort of mine. It's a bit like - well, you know what they say - home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

"Not in my bloody family."

"That's as may be - but look on this as a home in that sense. Wherever I am, there will always be a place for you there if you need it."

"If I were a nicer and less suspicious person I suppose I ought to be overcome with gratitude at this point, but... I suppose it's the Slytherin in me, but I more than half expect that if you're helping me you must have some ulterior motive."

"Oh, sure - but my ulterior motive is that I enjoy your company!"

He snorted at that. "So you've said - and to my mind that's the least credible part of your entire thesis."

"What's not to like? You're clever, original, amusing - OK, catty, but nothing I can't handle and, I know it makes me sound a bit sad and old-fogeyish but most of the people in IT are so much younger than me, it's just - nice, you know, to talk to somebody who's the same age as me; somebody who's read the same books, seen the same films, who remembers the same songs... The songs most of all, I think, because the music makes us - it shapes how we see the world. What?"

"When I was - fourteen," he said carefully, with the sweat sticking the thin material of the shirt to his skin, "there was a song that everyone was singing. It started 'Loving you is easy 'cause you're beautiful', and I could feel my own ugliness closing in like a vice."

She turned to him, frowning herself and gazing down at the strong, bitter planes of his face. "You're not - ugly, pet. Just - odd. You look fine, just in a way that's not - that one doesn't usually see in humans."

He made a thin, sharp noise, baring his teeth like a beast in pain, and Lynsey cursed herself under her breath. "Oh, look - I mean - I _don't_ mean you look bad or, or grotesque or anything, it's just that you look kind-of like an Afghan hound - all long bones and long nose and long hair - and that's quite bizarre if you take it as a human look, but in absolute terms Afghan hounds are better-looking than apes any day, all right? _Different_ doesn't mean _worse_: humans are really pretty funny-looking as a class. And besides - what does it matter? I happen to think you look OK but it hardly matters: it's your spirit that attracts me, your character."

He blinked at her. "Leaving aside for the moment the matter of your peculiar tastes, where did we go from 'like' to 'attracted by'?"

Lynsey blushed; she could feel herself doing it. The professor gave her an odd look. "And here I thought that I was joking," he murmured, easing himself down onto his back in the grass and looking mildly but definitely smug. "Wasn't the narrator in _Tam Lin_...?"

"Fighting to save her lover. Yes."

* * *

**PLEASE NOTE:** _Mood Music_, the story to which this is the sequel, is currently up for an award in the Identity (Best Original Character) category of Round Six of **The Multifaceted Fanfiction Awards**.

The story _Lost and Found_, by Borolin (which is to say, by **whitehound** and **Dyce** in combination), is likewise in the Tears (Best Darkfic) and Courage (Best Extreme Fic) categories. **Dyce**'s solo story _Survivors_ is also in the Rapture (Best Het Fic rated G to PG-13) section.

If you liked any of them enough to vote for them, please go to **The Multifaceted Fanfiction Awards** at multifaceted. creative-musings. com (no 'w's) and cast your vote before 22nd July 2006.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Systemic lupus erythematosus is an auto-immune disease which is often just called "lupus" - that is, "wolf".

A "stair" in this context is a group of flats branching off a common stair.

You can see the ruined cathedral at www. geograph. org. uk/photo/1648038 and the harbour pier at www. geograph. org. uk/photo/945287.

Blackpool is a famous holiday destination in the north of England, with many amusement-arcades containing, among other things, coin-operated automata known as penny-in-the-slot machines. The particular machine which Snape describes really existed in Blackpool in the mid 1980s, though I don't know if it would have been there when he was a child. I found it mentioned in a discussion at www. pennymachines. co. uk.

The Terry Pratchett book in which Gaspode the talking dog tried to protect Captain Carrot from the wolves was of course _The Fifth Elephant_. Terry also said that a witch has such pride, such arrogance, she looks at the people, she looks at the land and she says 'Mine' - and then she defends what is hers. But unfortunately I can't have Lynsey quote this, because it's from _Wee Free Men_ and that hadn't been published yet.

In the Scottish Border Ballad _Tam Lin_, a young man is stolen away to be the servant of the Queen of the Fairies, and given great honour, but after seven years he will be handed over as a tithe to Hell. A mortal girl falls in love with him, and in order to win him free she has to hold him tightly while he is transformed into a succession of monstrous shapes. In _Mood Music_, the story to which this is the sequel, there is a scene where Snape tries to drive Voldemort out of his mind (out of Snape's mind, that is, although the other would be good too) by concentrating on a grisly Mediaeval song about death. Voldemort attacks Snape through the Dark Mark and Lynsey claps her hands over it and tries to drive him out, and when she feels the Mark writhing under her hands, trying to throw her off, she thinks about Tam Lin and "Mine! Not yours, mine!"

Severus has been made a year younger when he heard the Minnie Ripperton song _Loving You_, to comply with his age as given in _Deathly Hallows_.


	10. 09 Present Company Accepted

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**9: PRESENT COMPANY ACCEPTED**  
((_In which various problems are pin-pointed._))

"I have tried," Severus said, leaning heavily onto the heels of his hands where they rested on the kitchen windowsill, and staring out at the small garden. "I have tried to feel again that... communion, whatever you want to call it, that I felt in the caves, when I called on the soul within the ground and felt it come to me. But I can catch only a sniff of it - I wondered if it was because - Well, I've always been more comfortable indoors, preferably underground, ever since..."

He turned his face away from her with a bitter grimace, and she touched his elbow. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Don't give me that. If you don't want to talk about it that's fine, but don't pretend there isn't anything there to talk about. I'm not daft - I can see when you're troubled."

He bowed his head, resolutely not looking at her. His eyes were still sunken into weary hollows, even weeks after Azkaban, and she thought that he was still not sleeping properly. "When I was at school, I mean as a pupil, staying in our - that is, in Slytherin's - dungeons was safe, comparatively speaking. Going above ground, or worse still going outside into the open grounds, meant being hexed from all sides, if the Gryffindor mob were feeling lively." Lynsey noticed that the thin trace of grey at his temples, which had been present in prison, had now mysteriously disappeared. "Even - even Lucius was better than that."

"I wish I'd been there," Lynsey muttered, half to herself. "I'd've given the little bastards something to feel lively about." He gave her a twisted little grin at that.

"I wish you had been. Anyway... to be honest, when I'm at Hogwarts I don't even like leaving the curtains open, if the window faces onto the grounds. What?" he added in his turn, as Lynsey gave a ladylike little snort.

"Well, it's just - it goes with the hair and the robes, doesn't it? It's very Goth."

"You mentioned that before. I thought Goths were some kind of late Roman-period Germanic tribe? Surely they wore - well, braids, and helmets, and so on."

"You're quite right, but the Goths I'm thinking of are a modern fashion-movement - usually in their teens and twenties, but you do get older ones as well. They get the name I suppose from Victorian 'Gothic' literature - you know, sort of overheated romantic horror-stories - and they wear black a lot, often velvet with a red or purple trim, and have white skin and long black hair - usually make-up and hair-dye, but you've got a head-start in that department - and hang around in darkened rooms talking about sad poetry. They're quite sweet, usually, if a bit posy. Oh and they're nearly always interested in magic, although usually just as Wiccan wannabees - only a few of them are really serious or know any real stuff."

"You mean like that - odd bloke on the boat? The bird-call one?"

"Yeah - that's it exactly."

"Huh. I can assure you I am not trying to be - fashionable. Quite the reverse, if anything. And I'm anything but sweet."

"Prince Charles said something to the effect that he always wears the same style clothes, and then if he waits he comes into fashion once every thirty years or so. And I think you're quite sweet, Prof - in a sour sort of a way."

"Sweet and sour sauce?"

"Sauce-_y_, certainly. You seemed all right in the garden the other day...?"

"Running through the tunnels with you was one thing, it was - weirdly enjoyable, in a heart-stoppingly terrifying sort of a way. I just wish - "

"What?"

"Wish that Draco had agreed to come with us," he muttered. "I worry about him, Lynsey - I worry about him all the bloody time, stranded there with that - _creature_ and that - simperingly sadistic tosser of a father of his, and I know there's not a damned thing I can do about it but believe me, that doesn't help."

"I believe you. Good summation of Lucius, by the way."

"I'd like to sum the bastard up by cutting him into very small pieces and then counting them, trust me. But anyway, being hung up in that little cave to be - and then being shut into a cell with no windows, thinking that I'd never - Now I think that as well as the original mild agoraphobia I'm now sodding-well claustrophobic as well. Which is just delightful," he said lightly, "because basically it means I now feel jumpy everywhere except for - apparently - extensive Stone Age tunnel-systems and large, well-ventilated rooms with the blinds drawn, but at least as far as my public behaviour goes they pretty-much cancel each other out."

Lynsey snorted at that, and Severus answered her with a shrugging, self-deprecating tilt of the head. "Anyway - sitting out in the garden with you is quite pleasant, I admit, but there's still that constant underlying feeling that somebody might jump me, and maybe when I'm above the earth instead of under it I just don't feel relaxed enough to be able to open my mind to it."

"It's not that," Lynsey replied with a small shiver, and moved to stand close against him. "Don't think it's that. There's been something wrong with the land energy everywhere, ever since last autumn."

"It seemed strong enough when we were in the caves."

"It was, and thank the gods for it, or I couldn't have done - what I did do." The idea that she might have had to leave him there, that she might not have been able to summon up enough power to break him free of the Unnameable One's torture, still made her queasy and cold, and she placed her hand over his, reassuring herself with his warm aliveness. He twitched irritably but did not draw away; and irritability, after all, was one of the signs by which biologists identified life. "But the caves have been in use so long, they're a major node, almost like a stone circle. Those - foci like that, they're still active, more or less; but the land in general..."

He turned and frowned at her, nearly not wincing, and she knew that his feet were paining him again. "Why is this?"

"Nobody knows, but I know it's not an isolated or local phenomenon; there have been reports in from America and Australia, all the same. But it's not... I don't think it is that the power's not _there_, you understand; it's more like there's some sort of interference preventing one from accessing it."

He turned around completely, then, until he was half sitting on the windowsill, taking most of the weight off his feet without admitting the need to do so, and linked his hands together under his chin, touching the tips of his long white forefingers to his mouth. "The timing is suggestive," he muttered, pursing his narrow lips. "Can you tell me more accurately..."

"A few days after Diana's funeral."

"The Muggle royal who was killed in a car crash? That would make it the second week in September, then, wouldn't it...?"

"About then, yes. Before then, there had been occasional power outages - afterwards, only occasional innages. Why, do you know something?"

"'Know' would be over-stating the case. Suspect, rather. Unfortunately the - He - I was already distrusted, on Bellatrix's bloody say-so, and so I was not privy to all that was going on, but I believe that - He - attempted some sort of land-raising ritual of His own, on the basis of what He had gleaned from books. It was only because He failed that He decided to capture and interrogate genuine practitioners."

"You think he may have created some sort of astral disturbance?"

"Given His personality and - and what I felt for myself, I think it unlikely that He would succeed in raising the land-power; I do not believe that the Land would accept Him. Yet He is immensely powerful, and the Dementors are breeding... Who knows what such _poison_ might do, introduced into the clean veins of the chalk?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Look, I know it's peculiar that the button you click to shut down is called Start but it just is, OK?"

"I thought you said this was an exercise in logic, not a - an arbitrary muddle of other people's left-over whims."

"It _is_ logical, sort of, just - locally logical. Every bit of the system was logical to somebody but when you bolt them all together they can get a bit - odd, and then you're stuck with it because it's too much effort to try to re-write it. Unless you want to find yourself metaphorically re-inventing the wheel, there are some things with Windows you just have to accept, OK?"

"I'm sure if I put my mind to it I could come up with a spell to redesign - "

"I'm sure you could too, and don't you bloody dare. You've already seen what trying to use magic too close to a computer does to the drives - why do you think I confined you to the laptop? And even if you succeeded in altering it without wiping it, it probably wouldn't work with anything else, any more - and you know using too much magic might attract attention."

He pressed his hands to his forehead in frustration, pushing his long hair back impatiently. "This is no bloody good - I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks."

"Nonsense - you're just tired, pet. Sit down, do: I'll make dinner tonight."

"At least when I cook I feel I'm doing something useful, but I suppose really I'm just - intruding in your space."

"Hush - you've done quite enough today. I can't imagine how tiring it must be, teaching magical combat to a gaggle of untried teenagers when you're - well, still far from fit yourself. And I've told you, I enjoy your company; you don't need to pay for your presence with anything except your presence."

"If you're nurturing romantic fancies about me O'Connor you'll have a long time to wait," he muttered, folding down onto one of the dining chairs and looking away from her again. "Not that you're not - "

"Not that I'm not what?"

"Not that you're not - tolerably attractive, and even if you - if you weren't, I'm in no bloody position to be picky, am I?"

"Gods, the romance. Pasta, curry or chops?"

"Pasta, please."

"Anyway," she said, frowning at him over the chopping board as she diced the garlic, "unless you tell me otherwise I do _not_ believe that you're gay, and you seemed pleased enough on Sunday with the idea that I might be interested in you - not to mention flirting outrageously when we were in the caves."

"I did no such thing" he snapped, turning towards her sharply and glowering as if he felt himself attacked.

"All right - I retract 'outrageously', but you were definitely flirting."

"Flirting is one thing, but - " He looked away again, tilting his head so that his hair hung down in curtains and shielded him from her eyes.

"What?"

"Don't ask. Please."

"All right Prof, I won't." She saw with concern that he was shivering, although the night was not unduly cold.

He nodded jerkily, then made an obviously conscious effort to look at her again, forcing a self-deprecating smile. "Besides, when we were in the caves it was all - different, somehow."

"Live every day as if it was your last, because it's probably going to be, normal restrictions need not apply - yeah. It was, to use a horrible buzz-word, a paradigm shift."

"Yes. Almost as if I was - well, somebody else."

"Would you _want_ to be somebody else, Prof?" she asked casually, reaching for an onion, and saw him flinch to his bones. "I'm sorry - "

He shook his head, biting his lip. "I hadn't had time, then, to - to think much about what had happened to me. I was just - just relieved that it had stopped happening. But - Azkaban - "

"Too much time to brood?"

He nodded tightly. "Far too much."

"Be a love and grate the parmesan. You did tell somebody, didn't you - about what you did to the guards?"

"Oh yes," he replied with a sort of generic low-level sneer, as he rummaged through the drawer looking for the grater; "I was very _responsible_."

"And - you're not going to get into trouble for it?"

"Scared they'll cart me off to Azkaban again?" he said mockingly.

"Considering the trouble we went to to get you out of there..."

"I wouldn't worry too much about it. Minerva has the Minister by the balls, in a very real sense."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"How are you finding it, anyway, teaching that lot to fight?" Lynsey asked, as they shared a post-prandial glass of wine. "Are they as bad as you feared?"

"To be honest, no - even Longbottom can remember which end of the wand to hold it by, three times out of five. And much as I hate to admit it, Potter is reasonably good. Even so - the idea that the nearly-sole hope for the survival of British wizardry, and _my_ bloody survival, depends on that - chippy, cocksure, sloppy..."

"Does it? Depend on Harry, I mean?"

"So the prophecy says." He knocked the remainder of the glass back in one, set it back on the table and curled himself into the yielding curve of the old sofa. His hands were shaking slightly. "Ask me what prophecy."

"What prophecy, Prof?"

"The bloody prophecy which I overheard - part of, anyway - and gave to Him, when I was - when I was one of them. The prophecy that killed Lily - she was my friend, my friend since we were children, and I fucking killed her. James, too, and he was a shit, but he didn't deserve that. The prophecy the second half of which was so damned secret Dumbledore didn't even tell Minerva or me about it until he knew he was probably going to die, that he might not be there much longer to run things, and then He - _He_ ripped it out of my brain, along with everything else I knew, everything Dumbledore had told me - so I betrayed everybody a second fucking time and I don't know which was worse, the betrayal I committed because I was venal and deluded or the one I committed because I was too fucking weak to keep my mouth and my mind _closed_."

"Pet, you couldn't expect - "

"What? That I might be - something more than the stupid, _snivelling_ weakling bastard Pettigrew and his filthy friends always said I was?" He sighed and leant his head back against the sofa, looking at her seriously. "I know they say - they _say_ that everybody breaks, in the end, but I'm not convinced."

"Um - I have to say that as far as I know you're right," Lynsey replied, troubled but honest. "There are some people who don't break." He would know if she lied, in any case. "But, love, the people who don't break - they're very rare, and they're either very specifically trained in ways your people haven't even heard of, or they're, um, nuts."

"Is it madness, then, to be strong and not weak?" he said bitterly.

"You're not weak, you loony - you're anything but. But, see - as I understand it, when someone is, is tortured" - she hated to say the word, it burned in her mouth - "it's fear as much as pain, the fearful _anticipation_ of more pain, which - "

"Yes. Until there's nothing left but pain and, and, and this sickening, absolute terror - until there's nothing left of your mind, of your self, except that overwhelming dread."

"Yes. Well, there are some people who just can't _do_ terror, but they have to be a bit nuts to be that way, because fear of pain is a basic vertebrate defence-mechanism. There was this guy, this Polish Jewish doctor called Garri Urban, who wrote this book called _Tovarisch, I am Not Dead_ which - well, which caused a certain amount of mixed feeling in the Jewish community at the time, as I recall, because books about Jews fleeing from the Nazis etc. etc. are supposed to be about terrible suffering nobly borne etc. etc., and this one should have been subtitled 'How I fought and fornicated my way across the wartime Soviet Union, fortified only by liberal draughts of surgical spirit.'" Severus gave a little snort at that, which she considered to be a Good Sign.

"Anyway, Urban was interrogated by the NKVD - the forerunners of the KGB? - never mind, by Russian security services, and they tried to torture him - but it didn't really work out that way, because he kept hitting them. They tried to sit him on a chair so they could loom over him and he hit them over the head with it. They tied him and left him on a block of ice for hours but when they came for him he still managed to stagger up and dump a bucket of pish over them. He still got beaten up, you understand - but psychologically he was just the loser in a brawl, not a, a helpless victim."

"I'm afraid that the - opportunities for fighting back are strictly limited when your opponents have all got bloody wands and you _haven't_."

"I know that pet, and I'm not suggesting... The point is that Urban was so aggressive, so - manic as a ferret on amphetamines, basically - that he just saw the situation as a golden opportunity to hit somebody, so he didn't get scared - he hadn't got room to be scared, because he was too busy spoiling for a fight. And he was cast-iron arrogant - he really loved himself - so he was just - insulted, but not humiliated. And when people insulted him, he thumped them - with a complete disregard for the odds against him which was, even by my standards, slightly nuts. And even Urban gave in in the end and signed their false confession that they wanted him to sign, rather than go on being beaten."

"How - disappointing. After all that."

"Oh - he was using a whole different script from the NKVD, so they couldn't tell what it was he was writing, and had to take his signature on trust. He didn't sign it with his name - he signed it with an obscene doodle. What was in this prophecy - after all that? If you're allowed to tell me."

"There's no point not telling you, is there, now that He - It's not as if it's any fucking secret any more, is it?" He drew a deep, ragged breath. "The first part... as I came to the door I heard Sybill's voice speaking to Dumbledore - only it wasn't her voice, it was - deep, hissing, like something from under the ground, like the original Pythoness. She said - 'The one with power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches' and that this person was 'born at the end of the seventh month' - presumably July - to parents who had defied Him three times. That was when Aberforth caught me ear-wigging and threw me out by my ear. I didn't know - God, I swear I didn't know it was a baby that was being referred to, the latter part, the part I didn't hear said 'will be born,' future-bloody-tense, but I didn't hear that, I didn't know it was someone not even born yet, I swear - "

"I believe you, pet."

"Then you're just about the only bloody person that does. The odd thing was, the way it turned out two boys were born at the end of that July - the rest of the prophecy apparently identified the vanquisher as male - and it could have fitted either Longbottom or Potter equally well, and I don't know which I find the more disturbing as a potential saviour. The prophecy said that one of them would have to kill the other - that is, the - Riddle and the vanquisher, presumably - because 'neither can live while the other survives'. Which is damned odd when you think about it, because they both _are_ alive. Potter may be the bane of my life but I've never actually suspected him of being an Undead - and it does seem as if it is Potter, not Longbottom, because the rest of the prophecy said the - He - would mark the boy as His equal, and He marked Potter, with that scar of his. Oh and that the vanquisher would have power He knew not, which Dumbledore believed to be the power of love, which - well, certainly He cannot feel or understand love, so it could be that, I suppose. Dumbledore said only great love would make someone strong enough to withstand the temptations of the sheer power which Riddle could offer them, which, well..."

"Which tells you rather more about Dumbledore than it does about the prophecy."

"Quite."

"And does it have to be just one? It couldn't be both of them?"

"It said 'the one' - but then it also said 'neither can live while the other survives', which is clearly not literally true, so I suppose..."

"And it said that the vanquisher 'approaches' - just as you approached the door?"

"Yes, she... shit." He gave her a wall-eyed look. "Don't even suggest it!"

"Well, at least you weren't born at the end of July."

"No, but I was born two months short. Shit."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She thought that one of the cats must have awoken her, or the wind in the trees outside, but her heart was hammering and her breath stumbling with distress. Both cats were on the bed and the trees, when she peered through the darkened glass at them, were barely stirring. It was when the thin wail came again that Lynsey realized, with a sinking sense of the inevitable, that it was not the wind that was weeping.

She padded barefoot across the boards to the door of the spare bedroom and then hesitated, wondering how and whether to proceed. Would he regard any intervention by her as comforting, or as an unwelcome intrusion? There was no further sound from his room. If the fit was past, now, it would be better not to embarrass him by admitting that she had heard... As she turned away she heard him cry out again, sharply, and she turned back and opened the door without thinking about it, and was at his bedside in two strides.

The professor was sitting up in bed, huddled against the wall. He stared at her wildly, his eyes open but focussed somewhere far beyond her, his hands trembling and twisting neurotically together. As she advanced towards him he cringed away from the movement and she sat down quietly at the foot of the bed, so as not to loom over him. "Severus," she said rather diffidently, "come on pet, wake up now."

The blind-looking gaze drifted across her face without apparent recognition, and he whimpered again and moved his hands restlessly as if trying to push something away. "Please," he whispered as his eyes gradually came into focus, "get him off me - oh God, please, get him away from me - "

"I won't let him near you, I promise. Who, pet?"

"Lucius - his hands were everywhere, all over me, oh God oh God I can't get away from him he was all over me, in my mouth, up my - "

"When you were at school?" Lynsey asked quietly.

"Then, too. Three bloody months ago." He had started to shudder violently, but at least he seemed to be properly awake now. "He made the most of his opportunities. Himself or - watching other people do it. At the Christmas revel he - " He wrapped his arms round his updrawn knees and began to rock back and forth on the mattress, repeating "Oh God oh God - "

Lynsey touched his elbow, very gently, but he shied away from her like a skittish horse and she clucked her tongue at him - exactly as if he was a horse. "This is just me, thou loon. You just - you don't have to be alone with it, that's all. If you'd prefer company." He didn't look at her - consciously looked away, in fact - but he snaked out one long arm and grabbed her by the forearm, holding on like a drowning man until his fingertips sank into the muscle with bruising force. "I did whatever he told me" he said faintly. "Anything, if only he would stop - hurting me."

She clasped her other hand over his and they sat in silence for a while, him shivering and staring blindly at some awful inner vision, and Lynsey simply waiting, patting his hand occasionally. After about ten minutes she said "Whisky?" and he nodded once, sharply. She disengaged herself from his desperate grip and went and poured him a generous measure of spirits, which he drank in one gulp and then held the glass out peremptorily for more.

After three doubles, knocked back one after the other in silent desperation, he uncurled enough to raise his head and look at her. She met his unfathomable eyes and smiled tentatively, and he stared wildly at her for a moment and then groaned and keeled over onto his side on the bed, still rolled up in a ball with his arms wrapped round his knees.

Lynsey fussed the blankets up around him to keep him warm and then sat down decorously on the floor beside the bed, half facing away from him, and murmured "You haven't made a fool of yourself, you know. You're allowed to feel bad about it. It was a very bad thing. But don't feel shamed by it, because you are not the one who has done anything to be ashamed of, here."

"Have I not?" his soft voice said bitterly at her shoulder.

"Is this about what you did as a Death Eater - again?"

"Don't mock me!"

"I'm sorry - I didn't mean to sound dismissive. I can never take the idea of you as a villain very seriously, but I can see it must be - miserable, horrible, to know that you did such things."

"I _committed_ rape."

"Of your own desire?"

"No! Oh, Merlin, no. Only to keep my cover, and only if I couldn't get out of it - and I got it over with as fast and as painlessly as I could. Even so - I can hardly complain if the same thing happens to me, can I?"

She half turned to look him in the eye, lying curled up on his side on the bed behind her as he was. "First off, the fact that you feel so bad about having had to hurt people is proof that you're not a villain. Secondly, it's not about 'complaining', is it? It's not like you're planning to send your life back to the manufacturer with a sharp note. You had an absolutely ghastly experience which went on for far too long, and you're allowed to freak out about it."

"It sounds so - manageable, when you put it like that."

"You will manage. I have faith in you, Prof. As for me - if we ever do get it together I promise I won't make any alarming sudden movements, trust me. I used to ride a lot when I was younger, and if you make any alarming sudden movements around horses, they treads on yer feet." She brushed her fingers lightly across his and he took her hand and held it. Some time after that, she heard his breathing settle into the quiet rhythms of sleep.

* * *

**Author's note:**

It's really true about the disruption of the land-soul energy, although in reality it presumably wasn't caused by Voldemort. The front-running theories are interference due to mobile 'phone masts, fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field or sunspot activity.

"Sybil" was the job-title of the oracular priestess at the Ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi; she was also known as the Pythoness. Her oracles were associated with steam rising from fissures leading deep into the earth.

To be "born short" does not necessarily mean that a baby was born prematurely (although it might have been) - it means it was born noticeably less than nine months after its parents' wedding.

I cannot, sadly, lay claim to the suggestion that Snape might himself be the one who "approaches" - somebody else suggested that on the Severus Snape's Slytherin Society discussion group.

But the observation that the bit of the prophecy which Snape heard did not state, or even strongly imply, that "the one" was a child is I think wholly original. It was only when I was writing this chapter, and reading through the exact words of the prophecy to work out which bits Snape was likely to remember _verbatim_ and which bits he would paraphrase, that I realized that all he knew was that "the one" was probably a Leo. There was nothing, in what he heard, to indicate that "approaches" meant "hasn't been born yet but soon will be," and no reason why he should interpret it that way. As far as he knew, it referred to an adult Leo who was physically getting closer.

That raises the question of why Voldemort interpreted it as he did - but he would have a much better idea than Snape of how many pairs of parents or prospective parents there were who had defied him three times, and he would also know, through Peter, that Dumbledore thought the prophecy referred to a child, because he would know that families with children born that July were being given special protection. And for all we know he may have killed a few adult candidates, as well, and have fully intended to work his way round to the Longbottoms once the Potters were dealt with.

In the light of the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, this chapter has been slightly edited to place more emphasis on Lily's death as a result of Snape relaying the prophecy.


	11. 10 Coming to Grief

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**10: COMING TO GRIEF**  
((_In which Severus suffers a loss, and finds the music._))

With less than two weeks to go until the concert, Lynsey started to worry about what they would wear. For herself she had a decent pair of jeans, and a blue-grey cord jacket over a military-cut satin shirt the colour of a cherry.

Severus had got himself a plain second-hand leather jacket, but other than that his sartorial purchases had not included anything really suited to a night on the town, and outside the safely academic environs of St Andrews his robes would incite comment. He declared it to be a hopeless enterprise and a lost cause anyway, and refused to shop for fripperies which he insisted would look like gilt scrollwork on a dredger; so Lynsey took matters into her own hands and kitted him out in a full-sleeved cream linen shirt of the kind made, worn and sold by members of the English Civil War Society, a stock in a dark chestnut brown which would not cast an unpleasant tint onto his pale skin, and a thin ribbon of the same colour to loop back his hair. He hissed at her and complained at being dressed up like a damned doll, but later she caught him admiring the general effect in a mirror, and scowling critically at his own teeth.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

At least, he was starting to get the hang of the laptop: if not actually programming yet, he was able to use it to write up his research notes on all the strange combat they had engaged in in Chislehurst Caves. This meant that he went from annoying her by asking her what button to click, every three minutes, to annoying her by demanding explanations of her take on astral travel, power-beasts and etc., and enthusing about aspects of modern computing which were, to her, absolutely routine.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I've been thinking - "

"And what a pleasingly novel experience that must have been for you."

"Shut it." She had had a hard and frustrating day dealing with a difficult client with a bad case of feature-creep, and was in no mood to be teased; but when she looked at the professor properly he looked even worse than she felt. There was a raw score across his cheekbone where one of his students had got in a lucky hit with a hex, crossing the still faintly visible marks of Fenrir Greyback's claw-like nails, and his skin-tone was greyish. "I've been thinking about what we were talking about the other day, about that prophecy. Even if it's a calendar reference, you know, 'the seventh month' could be July or it could be September because September - "

"- means 'month seven'. Yes." He was curled into the corner of the sofa again, looking unusually subdued despite the reflex crack about her thinking skills.

"Because the new year used to begin in March - yes."

"Not only that - it could mean the seventh month from when the prophecy was made, which was... it was at the beginning of April, so that would take us into November. Not to mention the possibility that it refers to somebody born two months premature..."

"Or, like yourself, born two months short. And we don't know whether the one who approaches, the one born at the end of the seventh month and the one with the defiant parents are all the same one, or not; or whether the mark with which he would be marked is the mark on Harry's head or the one that used to be on your arm - don't scowl. Like most spoken prophecy it's very ambiguous - that's why I prefer Tarot."

"But are the cards not - equally misleading?"

"Depends how you handle them. With cards, you can at least usually narrow it down by asking additional questions. And that 'neither can live while the other survives' clause is especially odd since, as you say, Harry and snake-features both demonstrably _are_ alive. In fact I wondered if it could refer to the mess you got into with the Vow and Dumbledore." She heard him suck in a ragged breath at that. "What?"

"Dumbledore is dead," he said bleakly. "I managed to get to speak to Horace after the training session today, and he told me - told me Dumbledore did survive the fall, he did ask him to help him to hide and fake his own death to protect me, but he didn't last out the week. The poison and the curse between them were too much for him - poisoned on Wednesday, dead on Saturday."

"Oh, my dear, I'm sorry." And she was, truly; even though she had never met this Dumbledore, and he had been dead nine months, for Severus this confirmation of death was a new bereavement, on top of the other shocks that he had suffered, and it was small wonder that he looked grey and shaky.

"I've been so... stuck there, with _them_, not knowing whether Dumbledore was alive or dead, not able to contact anybody to find out, and all the time - if I'd been there, I might have been able to save him. Horace is good, but he isn't in my league and we both know it. But I couldn't - and then, Christ, I was so - crying, pleading when they - hurt me, useless bloody -" He clenched his fists and drew a deep breath, trying to steady himself.

"But I never told Bellatrix I broke my Vow, even though that would have ended it. You understand that, don't you? If she, the Bonder, had known that I had refused to kill Dumbledore, that there was even a possibility that he was alive, then the Vow would have come into play and killed me, and I would have been spared... everything that came after."

"Yes. But you wanted to protect him."

"I thought that if he was alive, keeping silent about it was the best way to protect him and give him the chance to work unseen. Literally. If he _had_ been alive - the bloody man could turn invisible at will, did you know that?"

"Hah. No."

He nodded tightly. "So I, I stayed alive and let them - hurt me, to protect his interests. I thought that I was being so fucking brave, that I could prove I wasn't the coward Potter said I was, but in the end - the end of it was that the - He - broke me and violated my mind so completely, He took every other bloody thing _except_ that, until I was - until I fucking well volunteered information, to buy a few minutes' respite. That was what He bloody gave me, for every secret I spilled He gave me ten minutes without pain before it bloody started again, counted to the bloody second - so Potter was right, wasn't he?"

"It was still brave of you, it was, to go on living in so much pain to protect Dumbledore when you had a way out ready to hand, even if you were - acting on incomplete data." She could feel herself twisting her own hands together in her anxiety, wanting to make it better for him and not sure how. "The Morrigan will still love you for it."

"But _He's_ acting on very complete data now, isn't He? Thanks to me. I told Him the secrets Dumbledore died to find. _He_ knows what we know about the Horcruxes, about the prophecy; it would have been so much better if I had simply died, before I had a chance to betray - " He shuddered convulsively. "I wanted to die so badly oh, God, and I could have had that for the asking from the beginning and taken the Order's secrets to the grave with me, instead of - spilling my bloody guts, in the end, if only I hadn't been so fucking - stupid as to hope... To hope that I hadn't killed him."

"Pet, you didn't kill him, as far as I can see. If anybody did, Harry did, surely, by giving him the poison."

He gave a cracked laugh. "Try telling that to my esteemed wizarding brethren. Lupin keeps the paper from me half the time and pretends he forgot to buy it, and he thinks I don't know it's because the letters page is full of people baying for my blood, saying that the Ministry was wrong to release me - if this place wasn't warded I'd be inundated with Howlers. God help me if Scrimgeour falls, because if a Minister comes to power that Minerva can't twist around her finger they'll have me back inside for good. And Minerva and the rest will bloody disown me anyway when they find out that I failed to save him."

"You haven't told them yet?"

"I only managed to track Horace down after the meeting."

"I really don't think... I'm not entirely sure about Harry but I'm sure Minerva won't turn on you, or Remus - they know you didn't _want_ Dumbledore to die and, well, Remus is your dog now, whether you want him or not, and Minerva was so... she was really _angry_, upset, when they sent you to prison. Poppy, too - she's very fond of you."

"They pity me, more like, because they heard me - heard me beg. Only Dumbledore was ever truly fond of me I think, even if he did use me, and Dumbledore..." He fanned his long fingers in a gesture like something flying away.

"You have more friends than you think you have, pet. Truly."

"Don't be na?e. The ones who trusted me, trusted me because Dumbledore trusted me - not because _they_ ever did. And they were willing enough to believe I was a murderer."

"Some of them at least, were willing enough to believe that you weren't - when given the slightest encouragement."

He nodded wearily. "Wait and see, Lynsey. Just - wait and see."

"When will you tell them?"

"I'm not sure - soon - there's no regular meeting place now Grimmauld Place is no longer secure - thanks to me! - and the place and time of the next meeting hasn't been fixed yet."

"Bring them here, then - I don't mind. I can do cold meat and pickle, or something."

"So you can hold my hand in case I'm upset? I don't need your bloody - charity."

"I'd like to see them again - I got quite fond of them all - but Apparition isn't my favourite mode of transport, and in any case the more of the Order's secret hidey-holes I get to see, the more of a security risk I become. Whereas if you bring them here..."

"Oh, for a delightful social chat about how I failed to save the man they all worshipped as a bloody demiurge, and spilled the Order's secrets for the sake of a phantasm. I shouldn't complain if you see me as a bloody charity case - I'm bloody-well pathetic enough."

"There's nothing wrong with wanting to offer moral support to a friend, you know - or with wanting to accept it. Although immoral support is generally more fun."

He made a slight huffing noise at that. "It confounds me why you would even consider it. You can't possibly imagine yourself in love with me."

"Not as such, no. But you do... appeal to me."

"I'm not some bloody - big-eyed stray you can just pick up - "

"Not that sort of appealing - more like tormented-landscapes-full-of-dark-forests-and-crashing-waterfalls appealing." Sorrow and loss were etched into his hard face and she remembered again that he had, in effect, suffered a major bereavement today, even though his friend and quondam father-substitute had been dead for nine months. She stood up to go and make tea, that universal panacea; as she passed him she went automatically to touch his shoulder, but he jerked away as if her touch had burned him.

"I'm sorry," she said, drawing her hand back. "I didn't mean to offend you."

"I'm not - offended." He sagged back, letting his head fall back against the back of the sofa, and she saw that the skin around his eyes was papery with weariness.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When she came back with the full mugs, it was to find him moving his head from side to side and picking at the material of the sofa, restless and fretful. "You said the other day," he muttered, "that you were sure I wasn't gay..."

"Yes. Why, _are_ you?"

"I don't know - how can one be sure?"

"What do you mean, 'how can you be sure'?"

"Lucius - when we were boys - even after I was sure I didn't want him I still responded to him when he... Do I need to draw a bloody picture? And he said it proved that I wanted it really, that I was a..."

"You do know, don't you, that that's just neurological wiring? That sort of - well, stimulation of the, um, of the prostate will get a response even if the subject is unconscious."

He gave her an odd, mocking look. "You know this for a fact, do you?"

"Oh yes - it's how they get sperm samples from gorillas. Under general anaesthetic. I mean, you can see that if the gorilla was conscious..."

"Good grief. That's - but I didn't know that _then_, and he made me feel so - dirty. And then when I was - when I was sixteen Harry Potter's bloody father and godfather stripped me in front of half the school, when I had just been - in proximity with a girl I fancied rather madly..."

"I, um, I heard what you said to Lupin about that, when you were in sickbay. It sounded - ghastly."

"It was indescribably ghastly. And I - just before that - she was my friend, the only real friend I ever had I think, but I was so - angry and humiliated and so _scared_, so frightened of what Avery and that lot would do to me if I let myself be rescued by a Muggle-born, so scared of what Potter would do to her, too, if she didn't get out of the way and, and furious too because she looked as if part of her found it funny and I lashed out at her, I insulted her and she - I drove her away, she joined in with them and jeered at me too but I still thought she was - magnificent, and then she left me there. With them. I lost her, she was never my friend again because of it, and then they hung me up by my heels and stripped me, while I was still a bit... you know."

"So any time you get, um, interested..."

"Something in me is convinced that if anyone _notices_, I'll be held up for public ridicule and humiliation. Which I know intellectually to be ridiculous in itself - but knowing I'm being stupid just makes me feel even more bloody stupid." He turned away, letting the long hair fall across his face. "And they - and they did. Jeer at me. When I was - you know - in the Caves. If I - responded. Which just made the whole bloody neurosis ten times worse."

"Ack."

He flicked his hair back again with an irritable toss of the head and looked at her directly, mockingly. "Added to which, of course, and thanks mainly to bloody Lucius and bloody Bella, part of me now thinks that anyone who _desires_ me must be out to hurt me. I mean - badly."

"Shit."

"It's not," he said, in an unpleasantly precise tone, "as if anyone would want something like me for any purpose except to hurt me, is it?"

"Don't be an arse. But - you managed it with Narcissa, didn't you?"

"Frequently. But I was nineteen: at that age, things more or less run themselves. So why are you so sure...?"

"You mean, aside from the fact that you flirt with wimmin?"

"I could be bi... I don't _think_ I am, I don't desire men, but maybe Lucius just gave me a sickener - God." He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, looking genuinely queasy. "So why...?"

"Promise you won't be angry?"

"I promise no such thing."

"Um, well - you're so, um, catty and, um, a bit - a bit... dramatic, so if you _were_ gay you'd almost certainly be the queenie, bitchy kind."

"Granted. And?"

"Well... exactly how many screaming queens do you know that don't take care of their appearance?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Damn you, Snape, surely there was _something_ you could have done?"

"What could I have done, Potter?" He paused in his restless pacing, spun on his heel in a flare of black and bore down on the boy, a fixed snarl on his face. "You _tell_ me - what could I have done?"

"You could have fought them - "

"You have a very bloody inflated idea of my abilities. There were four of them, in case it escaped your notice - Dumbledore was unarmed and in no condition to engage in wandless magic, Draco was dithering and mithering and just as bloody likely to come in against me as for me and you were a sitting bloody _duck_ in the middle of a potential fire-fight, and no use to man nor beast since Dumbledore refused to unbind you. And if I went down - God, Dumbledore would have been killed for certain, and Greyback - "

Remus Lupin looked down at his own hands and muttered "He's right, Harry. Greyback would have been - a wolf among the flock. In a very real sense."

Severus bared his rather yellowish teeth at Harry, who backed up slightly, looking uneasy. "He wouldn't just have killed your little friends - he would have eaten them alive. _Literally._" He spun away again and paced to the window, his back towards them and his shoulders hunched like a mantling crow, and gripped the windowsill until his knuckles turned white. "And suppose, in the unlikely event that I had fought them all and won - what then? I would have been dead the instant word got back to Bellatrix - and it would have done, even if I had killed all four of them."

"I'm sure Harry didn't mean that you let him die to save yourself - " Poppy began gently.

"Didn't he? But what would have been the - the _point_ of my dying? If I was dead, I still couldn't have brewed the potions to save him - if I ever could have done, which is moot - so he would still have died, and you would have been left... that was all he bloody cared about, that one or other of us should survive to help you find the Horcruxes - and he said that I was better placed to do so."

"Don't!" Harry said sharply. "It was his secret - "

"But it's not a bloody secret any more, is it? Dumbledore told me every bloody thing he knew about it, to prepare me to work with you after he was - and now thanks to me, R-Riddle knows everything I know."

"Nobody is blaming you, Severus," Minerva said quietly.

"Aren't they? Well, bully for them, because _I_ bloody am."

The older woman - his boss now, Lynsey supposed, if he was still counted as a Hogwarts teacher - crossed the room to stand at his side, her expression troubled, and laid a hand on his sleeve. "You are," she said quietly, "no more than human, whatever you may think: no more and no less."

The professor nodded curtly. "Not to mention that I had to tell everything I'd managed to find out about the bloody Horcruxes to Lynsey here - with a memory charm to make it stick, no less - so that she'd be able to get the information to you in the event that you bloody shower shot me on sight. And it's no thanks to Alastor that she didn't have to."

"You and Dumbledore," Minerva said softly... "You and Dumbledore were always alike, you both cared far more about bringing Tom down, and about your students, than you did about yourselves."

"Dumbledore cared so much about The Cause that he sometimes took what I considered to be unconscionable risks with student safety, although it always seemed to work out in the end - so I suppose that in some mysterious way the old goat knew what he was doing. But he certainly... Draco told me, you know, that at the end - at the end, just before - just before I arrived, Dumbledore actually _praised_ him for a clever piece of work in getting my former bloody fellow Death Eaters into the building. The boy was trying to kill him, and he still gave him marks out of ten for it."

"So did you," Harry said suddenly. "_I_ was trying to kill you, and you still told me what I was doing wrong and how to do it better. Except in your case you were tearing me apart as per bloody usual, not praising me."

"If you had ever _deserved_ praise," the professor snarled, rounding on him, "I would have given it to you, but a more lazy, slapdash, dishonest, cocksure - "

"Steady on, Severus," Remus said sharply. "We understand that you're - well, under pressure, but to call Harry dishonest - "

"Oh but he is - aren't you Potter? He lied to me nearly every time he opened his mouth, I could feel it in him. Ask him about how he and one of his little cronies stole expensive, dangerous ingredients from my private store, which cost me nearly a month's salary to replace! And last year... last year he even stole my ideas, from one of my own old notebooks, and passed them off as his own in order to get a reputation for brilliance at Potions which was _entirely_ fabricated."

"Is that true?" the other man said, even more sharply. "Harry - did you really cheat on your class assessment?"

Harry looked uncomfortable. "Yeah, well - I didn't exactly, uh, mean to, and it's not like it would affect my NEWT scores or anything. It just - sort-of happened, and then I was afraid that if I told anybody they might take the book off me and I - well," he added in a small voice, "I really liked it. I really liked the boy who wrote it, and it made me _understand_, for the first time, that Potions could be quite interesting. At least, I could see why he - you - liked them, even if I didn't. And anyway," he added, in more his usual manner, "you're a fine one to talk about me being dishonest - _sir_. You didn't tell Professor Dumbledore about me having the book, did you - in case he found out that you were the one who invented Sectumsempra, and then left the book lying around for anyone to find."

"Wrong on all points, Potter, as per bloody usual. I didn't invent the bloody thing, I didn't leave the book lying around, and I went straight to the Headmaster about it as soon as I recognized my own book in your devious little mind."

"That's right, Harry," Minerva said, nodding. "He told me about it too - why did you think neither of us asked you where you found such a dangerous spell?"

"But then why - why didn't he - ?"

"Because _he_ bloody put the book there for you to find."

"He wouldn't - "

"He would and you know he would." Turning from the window and from Minerva, he made his way rather blindly to the sofa and sat down abruptly. Lynsey went to put her hand on his arm and then thought better of it in case it unsettled him, in such a strung-out mood, although he had not seemed to flinch much from Minerva.

"Why - ?"

"He said that if he - if we couldn't halt the curse on his hand, if we couldn't find a solution which would enable us both to survive, then you and I would have to work together, I to assist you in finding the Horcruxes - and in denaturing them without being blasted off the face of the earth - and you to - to keep me out of Azkaban. He was bloody-well delighted that you were concealing the book from me and using it to cheat in class; he said that it would prove to you that I was - that I was 'quite likeable in my own curious way'," he said mincingly, "and it would prove to _me_ that you were capable of learning what I wished to teach you. A fact of which I am still in doubt, since I saw no evidence that you didn't simply copy my work parrot-fashion in exactly the same way that you spent six years copying Hermione Granger's work, and fondly imagining that I wouldn't notice. Dishonest and ignorant to the bloody last."

Harry gave him a strange look, simultaneously contrite and smug. "I know this is going to sound really childish, but, um, I'll tell Dobby on you if you're nasty to me. If it's really true that Professor Dumbledore wanted us to work together, then you have to at least _try_ not to keep sniping at me all the time."

"It's what I do, Potter. You should know that by now."

"Being cheeky and cribbing Hermione's essays is what _I_ do, but you don't like it much, do you?"

Severus glared at him for a moment and then nodded grudgingly. "I - concede the point," he said, as if it choked him. "And you may tell Dobby that I said so, please. If I so much as swear about you behind your back the devious little brute somehow gets wind of it, and lectures me like a little maiden aunt."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I wanted to ask you," Minerva McGonagall said, pinning Lynsey against the kitchen wall with her steely gaze, "how you have found Severus to be coping, these last few weeks."

"It's, er, not really my place to say..."

"Well, he certainly isn't going to say, which is why I am asking you." The menfolk had been left in a state of uneasy truce in the living-room. Remus and Harry seemed happy with the idea that the women would do all the messy cooking stuff, even though Lynsey knew Harry to be a tolerable cook himself, and Severus was clearly reluctant to leave either of the other two unwatched; so Lynsey found herself pinned between these two iron matriarchs in the privacy of her own kitchen.

"He seems to be under a lot of strain," she admitted. "But you'd expect that, after everything which - "

"But that is precisely my point. He has had an appalling few months, even by the standards of a life which had never been easy or pleasant, and to have to know that the people he works with every day had heard him being - humiliated like that... and now this. This - additional loss."

"But you've all... you all cared about this Dumbledore bloke, didn't you?"

"Oh yes - but we had had seven months believing him to be dead, before Severus dropped the bombshell that he might not be. We had already - not 'got over it', it takes years to recover from a loss of that kind, but at least we had begun to adjust to it. Whereas Severus has spent all this time not knowing if Dumbledore was alive or dead, believing, _hoping_ that he had managed to save him, and now to find out that he failed after all..."

"Assuming he did fail," Poppy Pomfrey muttered, "and that this isn't yet another one of Dumbledore's little schemes."

"Oh, surely not." Minerva raised her hand in a rather helpless gesture, almost but not quite touching her fingertips to her own cheek. "Surely not even Dumbledore would be so thoughtless..."

"Be that as it may," said Poppy grimly, "Severus has been very seriously ill, and is still a long way from well. He may _think_ that he's fit enough to take on the whole world as per usual on the strength of a few weeks' rest, but that's just Severus being Severus, and I am afraid that if he continues to wind himself up like a watch-spring, that spring is going to break."

Lynsey nodded and grimaced. "Being resolutely himself, despite everything that was done to him, is admirable, really, and it would be a healthy sign; if only 'being himself' didn't mean being so bloody hard on himself."

Minerva pulled a wry face. "He doesn't quite dare say it to my face in case I pull rank on him, but he doesn't really believe that anybody else is competent to do anything unless he watches them round the clock. I've tried to tell him that not everything that happens is his responsibility, but he feels so bad about having been broken, about having betrayed Order secrets, he keeps on trying to make up for something nobody but himself blames him for."

"It doesn't help that so many people do blame him for - supposedly - killing Dumbledore," Poppy muttered. "Last week I went with him to Diagon Alley to choose potions supplies for the infirmary, and somebody actually spat on him in the street."

Minerva winced and made a small sound of protest, but Lynsey - who had acquired a fair idea of how Poppy's mind worked - asked "What did you do to them?"

"Trod on her instep," Poppy replied with satisfaction. _"Hard."_

"Good for you, then," Lynsey said, although the thought that it had been necessary made her feel exhausted and sad. "He _really_ doesn't need that kind of bloody idiot, on top of everything else."

"I'm afraid the 'everything else' may be getting on top of _him_," the nurse replied. "If it does... if you need me, call the Order member who is watching this stair, and they will summon me. Otherwise..." She fished in her robes and produced a flask of liquid the colour of sunlight shining through a dark amethyst, which she proffered to Lynsey. "This is Dreamless Sleep. Use it sparingly; taken too frequently, it can become addictive, and Severus has taken so much over the years that he has built up a tolerance. Nevertheless; a wine-glass full of this, if you can persuade him to take it, will ease him if he... if his sleep is disturbed."

"He has had - well, bad dreams, yes." She wasn't sure whether four a.m. freak-outs about things which had actually happened really qualified - but certainly it seemed to be bad dreams which woke him in the first place.

Poppy nodded briskly. "That's only to be expected, given his - history. He has always suffered from disturbed sleep, even when he was a child. How bad was it?"

"Worrying. Bad enough to wake me too."

The nurse nodded again. "Yes. It will be worse before it is better."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I thought that I was acting for the best," she heard Severus say wearily as she re-entered the room. "I thought that I could save him whilst still getting Greyback out of the school without serious incident. But instead, it turned out to be the worst choice I could have made. My own life is still forfeit if Bellatrix finds out what I did, or failed to do; I spilled my ruddy - guts to Him along with every bloody thing I knew, rather than risk Dumbledore's non-existent safety by activating the Vow which could have protected the Order and killed me; and yet Dumbledore is still - dead."

"Also, you yourself suffered horribly as a result," Lupin said softly. "That also matters."

The professor twitched his head irritably, as if shaking off a fly. "I should have trusted the old fool to know what he was doing, and killed him when he told me to, instead of faffing about trying to be bloody clever."

"But if you _had_ - just killed him, I mean," Harry said steadily, "then you wouldn't have broken your Vow, would you? So you wouldn't have been able to use that to top yourself. You would still have had no way out and they would still have br- ... um, got information out of you."

"He's right," Lynsey said, coming through and beginning to set out the dishes. "It's a _Kobayashi Maru_ scenario. There was no possible way to win; the best you could hope for was to lose with style."

Severus quirked an eyebrow at her and flashed her one of his there-and-gone smiles. "I hope I do everything with style."

"Hah."

"I know that you may not believe this," he said quietly, turning back to the other two men, "but I did try to save Sirius as well; with as singular a lack of success."

"You _hated_ Sirius" Harry said sharply. "Don't lie about it."

"Oh, I did more than hate him, Potter - I _despized_ him; and with damned good reason. And I won't deny that I enjoyed the chance to bait him and get a bit of own-back - after all that the bastard put me through when we were children. In fact, I felt about him almost exactly the way you feel about that great, bullying oaf of a cousin of yours - and for much the same bloody reasons. But you still did everything in your power to save him from the Dementors."

"Yes."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She got the chance to test Poppy's potion soon enough. It was the cats who woke her, moaning uneasily in the darkness, but once she was awake and had padded blearily to the bathroom she could hear Severus apparently having a muttered, angry conversation with somebody who wasn't there. Or, at any rate, with somebody she _hoped_ wasn't there.

She pushed the door open, quietly, and said his name, but there was no sign that he had heard her. His eyes were tight shut and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a flat snarl; as she approached he moved his head frenetically from side to side and muttered "...I won't, damn it, no... curse you, no! - take your hands off me - I never meant - I didn't, I swear I didn't - on my honour - no bloody honour left, swear it on Lily's grave ah, God, I didn't mean - "

She tried to wake him, even seizing him by the shoulders and shaking him, but his head still jerked from side to side and nothing seemed to interrupt the disjointed rubble of anger and grief. In the end, she brought a glass full of purple sleep, physically manhandled him into a half-sitting position as he flailed at her drowsily, poured what she could of the potion past his set teeth and then patted him on the back until he swallowed it down, and his restless twitching and muttering gradually eased into silence.

In the morning, he complained bitterly of a pulsing headache, and swore the potion had been badly made. When Lynsey pointed out that Poppy had told her it was from a batch which he had brewed himself, he snapped that in that case it had clearly been badly stored. But she forgave him his wilful bloody-mindedness for the sake of the blue veins threading his skin, and the tremor of exhaustion in his graceful hands.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Two days later they drove the fifty miles down the A91 to Stirling, and made their way to where the castle stood over the town like a dream; one of those peculiarly Scottish castles which let the terrain take the strain, and are basically a small fortified town perched on top of a very large rock. As they climbed up into the sky, higher and higher into the shelter of the rambling castle wall, following the music and the swell of the crowd, Lynsey felt her professor's fingernails digging painfully into her wrist and remembered that he was mildly agoraphobic. But when the rough melody began with a sudden thrumming along the nerves; when the crowd stood up and began to sway; when the lights glinted through the soft drizzle of rain and the sun sank crimson below the horizon and the sound carried them and lifted them up like a boat and the band cried out sorrow and strangeness and the people answered in a voice like the surge of the sea; then she knew that he had forgotten to be afraid.

Later on, they would go to a little Chinese place that she knew and have one perfect meal together, isolated from all care in an island of light and warmth and plenty as the rain gathered force beyond the dark windows. But here and now, there was only the music.

* * *

**Author's note:**

When I first roughed out this story I couldn't make my mind up whether Dumbledore was alive or dead. JK Rowling's insistence, at a conference in New York, that he really is dead has somewhat lowered my respect for her as an author, since it presumably means that all the anomalies in the Astronomy Tower scene were not cunning clues, just sloppy writing. But it pushed me towards having Dumbledore not have survived.

"Feature-creep" is a techie term. It means that a client orders a piece of programming or website-design and then they keep on coming back partway through the job asking you to add new features, which will greatly increase the time and work involved, and for which you probably won't get any extra money.

"Mithering" is a northern English word; strictly it means "nagging" but it can also be used to mean bleating on about something.

"Own-back" is revenge.

"Let the terrain take the strain" - pun on "let the train take the strain", a famous advertising slogan for British Rail which has passed into the language.

So far as I know Runrig did not do a concert at Stirling castle in 1998, although they did a spectacular one there for their 30th anniversary in 2003. Their concerts are famed for their high level of audience participation.

This chapter has been slightly edited in the light of the new canon in _Deathly Hallows_, to place more emphasis on the curse which Dumbledore suffered, to make Sectumsempra not Severus's own invention and to emphasize that the Pensieve/bullying incident was so terrible partly because it resulted in a break-up from Lily.

**PLEASE NOTE:** _Sons of Prophecy_ has been nominated in the Azkaban category of the **The Sorting Hat Harry Potter Thematic Fanfiction Awards**. Readers who liked it enough to vote for it should go to **The Sorting Hat** at partial-eclipse. net / sortinghat / and cast their vote by 1st October 2006.

In some respects this story covers similar ground to the story _Lost and Found_ which I am currently writing jointly with the writer **Dyce**, under the joint pen-name **Borolin**. I had finished _Mood Music_, the story to which _Sons of Prophecy_ is the sequel, and had already mapped out much of the plot of _Sons of Prophecy_ before **Dyce** and I read the story _Missing in Action_, by **Sheriff of Nottingham**. In that story a hideously injured and mentally destroyed Snape is returned to Hogwarts after four ghastly months of intensive torture, starvation and sexual abuse, and his colleagues can do nothing for him except keep him company while he dies.

I find stories in which terrible things happen to somebody (especially Snape) and there is no ultimate hope for them acutely depressing, and they always make me want to change things so it comes out all right - and although Snape's injuries in that story were terrible they were ones which modern Muggle medicine would have at least a fighting chance of combatting. Therefore, **Dyce** and I decided to write an alternative ending in which Snape is saved, with the assistance of a Muggle surgeon, and a team of friends and colleagues then have to battle to restore his fractured mind - developing eventually into an HGSS romance.

This explains how I ended up simultaneously writing two stories in both of which Snape had been revealed as a spy, tortured and sexually assaulted, and in both of which he forms a friendship, eventually tending towards more than a friendship, with a female carer. But the nuances of Snape's situation in the two stories are very different.

Snape in _Lost and Found_ is initially in a very much worse condition, crippled and catatonic, unable to tell what is real and what a dream; whereas when Snape escapes from Voldemort (with Lynsey's help) in _Mood Music_ he has "only" been tortured for two and a half weeks and is still fairly coherent and just about capable of walking. But when it comes to processing his own trauma, Snape in _Lost and Found_ is actually in a rather better position. Enforced bed-rest due to the severity of his injuries means that he has, probably for the first time in decades, actually been getting enough sleep, he is heavily protected and in the safest place he could be, and The War is not currently his concern; so although he is very deeply traumatized he is, in some ways, under much less stress than usual.

Snape in _Sons of Prophecy_, on the other hand, is exhausted and still in considerable danger, vilified for the apparent murder of Dumbledore and trying to play a major r?e in the Order whilst effectively heading for a nervous breakdown. And the totally-shattered-yet-fairly-relaxed Snape of _Lost and Found_ feels constrained to be much less harsh towards Hermione, who is so much younger than him and so delicate-looking, than the only-partially-shattered-but-incredibly-tense Snape of _Sons of Prophecy_ is towards Lynsey who is both older than him and an obviously tough broad.

Readers may be interested in an essay on Snape's character entitled _Reserved!Snape - Canon or Fanon?_ which I have posted on my website (www . whitehound . co . uk / Fanfic) in response to some of the reviews for _Lost and Found_.


	12. 11 Poetic Licence

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

Apologies for the length of time it's taken to update this. I had my computer down for almost a month, then I was tied up with working on a massive essay on the layout of the Hogwarts grounds - which has taken almost a year and is still not finished - and although much of the latter part of this story is already written I'm having trouble working out "how to get there from here". Then my intention of getting it out for Boxing Day was sabotaged by the Uncommon Cold from Hell and by the chapter itself turning out much longer and more complicated than I had expected. But I'm certainly not going to abandon this story, and I hope to have the next update out in somewhat less than the three months it's taken me to do this one.

* * *

**11: POETIC LICENCE**  
((_In which damages are limited, and options assessed._)) 

He had taken to surfing the net like - not a duck to water, perhaps, but a reasonably seaworthy chicken. When she wasn't using the dial-up herself she would often find him poring over some obscure occult or herbal text and amusing himself by finding fault with it. So she wasn't surprized to see him staring at the screen, his posture poised and tense, leaning forwards - but the iron grip of his hands concerned her, clenched on the table's edge with the knuckles standing out like ivory beads. As she moved towards him he whipped round and then relaxed, defeated-seeming rather than relieved, his eyes like liquid night.

She looked at the screen, at what he had been so fixated on, expecting some horror, news of a death, perhaps, but it was only poetry. If good poetry was ever just an "only". The verses were scrolled up the glass, as if he had been looking at the end of it; her gaze slid down the column of words idly and saw what had caught his eye:

"...I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness---that the darkness flung me---  
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,  
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness  
And we call it wisdom. It is pain."

She stepped back to stand behind his chair and laid her hand on his shoulder, tentatively, ready to snatch it away if he flinched; but he leaned against her touch, slightly, and dropped his head, and his hands unclenched themselves from the table's edge and drew back cautiously into his lap.

"I have to go away," he said quietly. "Not - not forever I don't mean, I just - Order business. That's all."

"How long for?"

"A week, maybe. It's for... brainstorming session, Filius calls it, but really it's bloody damage limitation, to try to work out where we bloody go from here, now that the - He - knows every bloody thing I know, practically."

"They won't blame you - "

"Will they not?" he said bitterly. "Minerva - Minerva I grant you is being - being kind, I suppose, and Lupin as you say is my dog for good or ill, though why he should want to be baffles me. Arthur will be kind too, because he always bloody is. I suppose I should be glad of any kindness I can get," he added almost under his breath. "But Alastor, Kingsley, even that wretch Mundungus - Minerva expects me to bloody _lead_ them and I have to stand up in front of them and explain how I betrayed them."

Lynsey gave a small and fairly ladylike snort. "I imagine she thinks if they get nasty you can just pull rank and tell them to sit down and shut up."

He looked at her sideways through his hair, and she saw the momentary flicker of a smirk. "There is that."

"When do you have to leave?"

"Tomorrow. I wish - "

"What?"

"Nothing. It's just - "

"What?"

"I've got spoiled," he muttered quickly. "Used to having a - to having company."

"Minerva is your friend too, you know."

He sighed and then rubbed at the back of his neck, massaging tired muscles. "I do believe she is, as strange as it seems, but she is also arguably my employer and it's hard to - what friendship we have is largely based on provoking each other. Amusing, but not - " He pulled a dour face, and left the sentence hanging.

Lynsey flopped down into the armchair and looked at him, resting her elbows on the arms. "No good for unwinding with?"

"Not much." He looked away from her - a sure sign, she thought, that he felt embarrassed or ashamed at revealing some perceived weakness or other. "I wish..."

"I could come with you - " She stopped abruptly. Thought about it. "_Could_ I come with you?"

"In theory - I suppose - you're not the Secret Keeper, you couldn't betray the exact location even if they - "

"Even if the Mouldywarp's lot captured me," she said sombrely, "and I'm quite sure I'd break a lot faster than you did."

He gave her a bleak look - but at least he was no longer looking away. "If we Apparated straight there, you wouldn't even be able to describe the area around it. But - I can't ask you, it's - ridiculous, I'm not a - a child, and you have your work."

"This is what we have laptops for, though, so that work can go with us, and it would be so nice to see them all again - even if it was only between meetings. I really would like to come. If I could."

"I'm not sure if it would work..."

"Well: I know Arthur managed to get a telephone to work in a standing magical field, but I suppose he has a particular gift for technology..."

"If Arthur can do it, I'm damned sure I can!" he snapped back, bridling slightly, and Lynsey bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from grinning.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You really are - certain about this? Not just because - because you think I'm too bloody feeble to look after myself?"

"I don't have to be - " She stared at him, baffled and trying to think of a way of explaining something so obvious that she'd never really had to think it through. "Look - there's nothing - _wrong_ about having a friend chum you somewhere, or wanting them to, whether it's because you feel like you need the company or just because - " She bit back "that's what friends do" and substituted the slightly less loaded "because you're mates", but he made the connection anyway.

"I wouldn't know," he snapped, "would I? Never having had any - _chums_..."

"...whether pedigree or otherwise," Lynsey murmured, unable to resist a good feed line, and Severus snorted.

"I suppose you could call Lucius a pedigree chum if he hadn't - if he had ever really been a bloody friend and not a - just another sort of bully."

Lynsey winced inwardly at the memory of the blond man's hateful, gloating voice as he relished her professor's humiliation. "I could definitely see him as something brown and wobbly and smelling of monosodium glutamate, though." Sometimes when she looked at Severus the image came, unbidden, of how she had first seen him, stripped and bloody and shrieking for mercy. When it did she pushed it away at once, fearing he would see it in her mind and think himself shamed by it, although all it made her feel towards him was a fierce urge to protect him. "You can do better than that berk, for damned sure - even a Pet Rock would be better. Muggle thing," she added, seeing him open his mouth to ask. "Just a - a silly toy." Besides, the near-mindless agony in which she had found him wasn't what was important: it was the courage and the spirit he had shown later which mattered, which defined him.

Cautiously, as if a sudden movement might make him startle away, she reached out and fussed a strand of hair back from his face, tucking it behind his ear without touching his skin. "I'd miss you, anyway," she said. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself, now, if I was here for a whole week with just the cats, and it will free up two Order members from guarding me. And besides, I really _do_ want to see Arthur and Minerva and that lot again."

"One."

"Hmm?"

"One Order member. There'll still have to be one left to watch the flat, to be certain we won't walk into any little... unpleasant surprizes on our return. Still: even freeing one up is, as you say, useful."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was probably as well that she _did_ have her work: she would only have fretted, otherwise, waiting out the long day while her professor was in conference with his colleagues of the Order. She had brought a small petrol-driven generator with her and set it up at the edge of the magical field, to re-charge the laptop's batteries with: and Severus had managed to contain both a telephone point and the computer itself in a null-field, a little bubble of non-magic. Interestingly, this interfered with Lynsey's own feeling of connectedness with the machine: evidently her magic and his were indeed interconnected at some deep level, even though superficially they appeared very different.

The generator wasn't the only thing they had brought from home: the cats, too, Nestor with his black coat and white shirt-front, and Starbuck with his patches of coffee-brown and white, were slinking about the room, flat-eared and dubious about the whole enterprise. Lynsey would have been afraid that they would run away and lose themselves, but Minerva, who had something of a special insight into all things feline, had charmed them to stay within five hundred yards of Lynsey's room, so that they could have an interesting holiday without getting lost.

She could hear voices coming along the corridor - Harry arguing with Severus (of course). They seemed weirdly fascinated with each other - like somebody picking at a boil, she thought.

"...had only come to me first, instead of tearing off to London without adequate backup - "

"It never even occurred to me to ask you, until I saw you in Umbridge's office, and by then it was really too late. Would have been too late, if - if what I saw had been real."

"But that's my point, Potter - it 'never occurred to you' that I might be - well, something with any value. A real man, not just a - a sort of lay figure for you to despise."

"Of course it didn't bloody-well occur to me to ask you - sir. After what you did when I asked for help for Mr Crouch - "

"Oh." He half-opened the door as he said it, and Lynsey could see him standing in the doorway, looking baffled. "But I..."

"Had you forgotten - _sir_? You told me Professor Dumbledore was busy, you wouldn't even let me speak to him, and it was a lie, he _wasn't_ busy because he came out a minute later - "

The professor lounged back against the doorpost and folded his arms, looking casually austere and forbidding. "You were fourteen, Potter, and I was sensitive of Dumbledore's dignity even if he never bloody was about mine. I was hardly going to say 'The Headmaster is taking a leak', was I?"

"Oh." The boy actually blushed, slightly but definitely. "But - you could have said he'd be down soon, or, or taken some action yourself, not just stalled me when there was a - a real emergency."

The older man had the grace to look embarrassed. "I could have: but since I knew Dumbledore _would_ be down in a minute, I was enjoying myself too much winding you up. Childish of me, I know, but, well..." He looked away slightly, not meeting the younger man's eyes. "I had no particular desire to go to the assistance of Bartemius Crouch."

"Why not?"

"Surely you must know... or perhaps not. I do forget, sometimes, that you were not - raised as a wizard. During the, the first war against Voldemort, Crouch became as vicious as all but the worst of the Death Eaters he opposed. He authorized the use of Unforgivable curses on prisoners - including the Cruciatus. Against suspects whose guilt hadn't even been proven..."

"Um, yeah, Sirius told me."

"He probably spoke from personal experience... as I do."

"I - I know you were investigated, but I thought Professor Dumbledore..."

"He did, but not - not fast enough. There was a limit to even Dumbledore's influence - as the continued incarceration of that silly little fantasist Shunpike should show you."

"So Crouch - he - you - ?"

"Articulate as ever, Potter? Oh - not with his own wand, no. But he - he liked to watch. And not even because he was a giggling, twitching sadist like Bellatrix but because it made him feel _righteous_ to see those he considered to be unrighteous... squirming in the dust. Literally."

"Oh. I'm - really sorry. Truly."

"Oddly enough - oddly enough I believe you are" Severus said, in a voice which sounded suddenly rather husky.

"Yeah, well," the boy said darkly. "I know you think - think if you admit to having feelings about things people will use it against you - but really, I find you a lot easier to put um, get along with now I know you're stressed-out instead of just a general evil-tempered sod. Sir."

"Thank you so much for that, Potter," the professor replied rather balefully, but Lynsey could see a faint quirk of amusement at the corner of his narrow jaw. "I'm sure we shall all sleep much better in our beds, knowing that."

Harry actually gave a little huff of laughter at that, and Lynsey thought that that was a great advance: if they could make each other laugh, they might even be friends of a sort, one day.

The boy pressed his hands flat against the wall on either side of himself and ducked his head, his messy black hair standing up like hedgehog spines. "I did think about what you said, about... about me trying to save Dudley. I know when you - when you were trying to have Sirius Kissed, you thought he was a Death Eater - "

"Yes. I thought he was the - That One's agent, the secret one, the one the rest of us weren't allowed to know the name of. I thought he was the one who - who turned my moment of idiocy into murder, who defeated my attempts to save your parents and made a mockery of my change of heart."

"Yes - I do see."

"You _don't_ see," the professor said sharply. "I thought he was the - Riddle's best agent, that he would know that I was a Death Eater and know that I knew that he was."

"Er..."

"Don't overtax your brain, Potter. I had to - I _had_ to try to defeat him, I thought he was there to kill you and I had to bloody-well save you, didn't I? That seems to be my whole bloody purpose in life. But if I saved you from somebody who knew I knew he was probably doing - Riddle's - will, he would know where my true allegiances lay, and if I didn't silence him I'd be a target for every ex-Death Eater with a grudge including _him,_ if he escaped."

"Oh. But - didn't Pettigrew..."

"Make the same deduction? Fortunately for me, Wormtail isn't bright enough to work out that in attacking Sirius I was attacking someone I _thought_ was his Master's agent, and - He - isn't interested enough in His subordinates to actually ask him about the circumstances of his escape."

"If you'd got a medal for it, though, it would have been a bit on the public side..."

"Oh, but at least it would have been some bloody recompense, instead of forever being sneered at by the likes of Alastor Moody - and you! - and, well, it wasn't as if I could have kept my part in Sirius's arrest a secret anyway. But at least with him Kissed it would have been only the werewolf's word against mine as to the exact circumstances, and I could have come up with some sort of convincing lie - and don't pull that bloody face at me, Potter. For good or ill you _know_ how little weight a werewolf's word carries in our society: you saw as much at my bloody trial. Whereas Black - if he had been what I thought he was, he would have been one of Riddle's most trusted advisors."

Harry looked up at him, too interested to be resentful. "I didn't get that impression from Wormtail, I have to say."

"Wormtail is such a twitchy little shit that not even a psychopath like Riddle could place much reliance on him, but he _does_ have his Master's ear."

"Yeah," Harry muttered under his breath. "Probably in a box in the fridge..."

Severus quirked an eyebrow. "That would not surprize me. And _he_ may not have worked out the implications of my willingness to arrest Sirius, but I'm sure it contributed to dear Bellatrix's suspicions of me, which - which in the long term were partly responsible for this - situation in which the Order now finds itself."

"Yes. Um. Hermione said you were right - it was unfair of me to blame you for winding up Sirius when I do the same to Dudley. Even though I kind-of expect I'll have grown out of it by the time I'm..."

"Potter...!" the professor said warningly. Lynsey wondered to herself whether it was only his promise to Dobby which kept him from retaliating with a full-bore verbal assault, or whether he was indeed beginning to learn the difference between affectionate teasing and bullying spite. The remarkable thing was that Harry did sound almost affectionate.

"Yeah, well, but you - Malfoy broke my nose and I was all over blood, I know I was, and all you could do was snarl at Tonks and me and I thought you were being horrible because her new Patronus looked like Sirius and he was only just dead and - only it wasn't, was it?"

"Oh, credit me with _some_ bloody decency, Potter. If Nymphadora's new Patronus had been Padfoot I wouldn't have mocked the dog in front of his cousin and his godson - not two months after his death! Four months, possibly..."

"Oh, _don't_ pretend to be sensitive all of a sudden" Harry snapped, suddenly angry. "You were willing enough to make me read all Sirius's and my f-father's detention notices, you must have known that it would - "

"That it would what, Potter? Upset you? You'd just nearly bloody _killed_ another student and there you were lying to me about the book and radiating anger and arrogance, not remorse - what could I think but that you were turning out much too damned-much like Sirius for comfort? I wanted to show you what a - a pathetic r?e-model he really was."

"Yeah, well - I didn't mean to hurt Malfoy like that, and he was trying to _Crucio_ me at the time - "

"Ah." Severus coughed delicately. "He didn't - ah, tell me that little detail..."

"Well, he wouldn't, would he? He wasn't going to tell you anything which might land him in Azkaban before he'd finished killing the _Headmaster_ - "

"If you had told me you were acting in self-defence - "

"What would have been the point? Would you have believed me?"

"Yes, of course - if you had been honest. Haven't you worked it out yet? I'm a Legilimens: if you had paid attention to our lessons you would know that I _know_ when you are lying to me: even if I don't always know exactly what you are lying about. And you were always - lying to me."

Harry frowned, and pulled his glasses down his nose so he could rub tiredly at his eyes. "I suppose I was. Thinking about it. But not - everything was always so complicated, somehow, and I always ended up protecting other people's secrets - Hagrid's, Cedric's - "

Severus snorted. "'Hagrid's secret' is an oxymoron, Potter. I think I already knew everything he ever got up to - yes, including the baby dragon he got you to post to Charlie Weasley."

"Hah. So... if it wasn't because of Sirius, why were you so - so rude to Tonks?"

"Oh, surely you can imagine that after the charming trick your charming godfather and his cronies played on me - I was ravenously hungry, I was missing the Sorting feast where I should have been there to oversee my new students, all because of you, and I'd just been bounced out at by a Patronus in the form of the same monster that nearly bloody ate me, of _course_ I was - not in the best of tempers."

"Yeah, well - I guess. But, um, that wasn't what I wanted to talk to you about, anyway."

"Well - out with it, then!"

Harry cast a wary glance at the room's human occupant. "Does Lynsey - does she know about what we were discussing with Bill...?"

"If you mean, does she know about the Horcruxes, then yes. I had to inform her about them because there was a good chance that I would be killed, and I needed somebody I could trust to take information to the Order for me in that event."

"In that case... could I - could I come in and sit down?"

"You would have to ask Miss O'Connor that."

"Ah. So, are the two of you...?"

"We appear to be sharing a room, yes. You would have to ask Professor McGonagall why, since she made the arrangements."

"Of course you can come in, Harry," Lynsey said, and the boy stepped further into the room and sank down on a chair by the table, looking restless and subdued.

"Well, Potter - what is it?" the professor said sharply.

Harry looked up at him bleakly. "I think I may be a Horcrux."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Lynsey thought, or hoped rather, that Severus would immediately pour scorn on the idea but instead he sat down in the faded armchair, taking the strain off his damaged feet, and gave the boy a steady, level look. "Dumbledore and I - did discuss that possibility," he said quietly.

Harry nodded tightly. "Is there - if it's true, is there any way of getting it out without killing me?"

"I am not certain. The act of removing a Horcrux can be dangerous even for the witch or wizard performing the removal - as you saw from Dumbledore's injuries which he sustained as a result of cleansing Marvolo Gaunt's ring. Admittedly it wasn't clear, in that case, whether the curse related to the Horcrux or to the ring itself - but since the locket was also so heavily defended..."

The boy nodded again. "I don't want anybody to blow themselves up trying to get it out of me without killing me, so if the only other way is... If - if there's no other way to get rid of it, will you do it? Sir?"

The professor's face hardened. "Do you think me so inured to violence that you can use me as your hired killer?" he said bitterly. "You think that after firing on Dumbledore, killing a student would be small fry, is that it?"

"No! I didn't mean - it's just... I know you'd make a clean job of it. If you had to do it. You wouldn't make a mess of it or, or prolong it by arguing or anything."

After a moment, Severus gave a quiet nod. "Very well; but I sincerely hope it won't come to that."

"Oh, me too!" the boy said fervently. "But - well - "

"Quite."

"Are you allowed to talk to me about it?" Lynsey asked.

"I don't see why not," the professor replied wearily. "It's not as if - He - doesn't know it all already; thanks to me. There are... you know what a Horcrux is, a fragment of soul peeled away from the donor by an act of ritual murder and stored in a specially-prepared object. Dumbledore believed that - Riddle - had intended to split His soul into seven parts: six Horcruxes, you see, and the bit that's still in His body."

"Seven being one of the numbers of power."

"Quite. You understand that - He - originally sought power in the nineteen-sixties and seventies but He was seriously damaged and disembodied during an attack on Mr Potter's parents in nineteen eighty-one, and only returned to full physical life three years ago."

"Yes."

"Consequently there are - two _waves_, two phases of His existence, and possibly two phases of Horcrux creation. During the first - we know that He at least intended to make six Horcruxes, but the process is complex and we do not know how far He had progressed. Dumbledore believed that He intended to use the attack on the Potters to make a Horcrux, but we do not know if that was the sixth and final one or not. We are certain of the nature, and even of the existence, of only three: a diary, which was destroyed; the Peverell ring, which Dumbledore successfully denatured at the cost of his right hand; and a locket which once belonged to Salazar Slytherin himself, which we do not possess but are confident of reclaiming in the near future."

"Yeah," Harry muttered: "now that that thieving bastard Dung is out of jail and can tell us who he fenced it to." The professor quirked an eyebrow at him. "And then he - Professor Dumbledore - he thought Voldemort's snake, Nagini, was one, because she - because she seems to have a special connection to Voldemort's mind. But so do _I_, to Voldemort and to the snake, and I'm afraid that - well, Professor Dumbledore thought Voldemort came to my parents' house meaning to make a Horcrux by killing me, and instead he - he killed my mum and dad instead and I'm scared the Horcrux went _into_ me, instead of whatever he'd meant to use."

"If so," Severus said thoughtfully, "there should be something, some object, in the ruins of Godric's Hollow which He had intended to use... unless it's already been removed?"

"Yeah, well - that's part of why I - why I'm afraid it might have gone wrong. When I went to Godric's Hollow I found - found this really old chess piece, made out of a walrus tusk, Hermione said it looked like some really old ones they found in the Hebrides, from the time of the Founders and I'm sure it wasn't the sort of thing my parents would have had. And it was a Viking sort of thing and I thought - maybe it was Godric's and anyway if - even if the Headmaster was right and there were no relics of Godric's except the sword, then maybe using something from the time of the Founders and doing the spell in Godric's Hollow - the Hollow itself is a sort of relic of Godric's, isn't it? So I think Voldemort brought it with him, but it..."

"But it was just a chess piece" the professor said, in what was, for him, an oddly gentle voice.

"Yes. If he was planning to make a Horcrux out of it - well, it didn't work."

"However, I can assure you that He did not have Nagini before His - immolation, so if she is indeed a Horcrux she is one made since His return. If He came to your parents' house meaning to make a sixth Horcrux, and failed, then if Dumbledore was right surely Nagini, not you, is the sixth Horcrux."

"We don't know the chessman was going to be number six, though, do we sir? That was just Professor Dumbledore guessing. We know Voldemort had Helga Hufflepuff's cup and he probably used that for Horcrux number four, but how do we know whether the chessman was number five or number six? Or even - even if it was six, if V-Voldemort doesn't know when a Horcrux is destroyed - the Headmaster said he didn't think he did know - maybe he doesn't really know when one's created either. Maybe he made an extra one by mistake."

"In which case," the professor said, frowning and rubbing his fingers fretfully across his lips, "there would still be four Horcruxes to account for: Hufflepuff's cup, an unknown object probably associated with Rowena Ravenclaw, Nagini and - and yourself. Possibly."

"But you don't know for sure," Lynsey asked, "that snake-face actually got as far as making the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw ones?"

"No," the professor admitted. "It is only an assumption, based on the length of time He had available to Him and the - well, let's say there was no shortage of murders He could have used to split His soul. It's a virtual certainty I think that He did make one using Hufflepuff's cup, since we know He had it in His possession for a very long time, but He does seem to have been trying to build up a quartet of object based on the four Founders, and if He had not yet succeeded in locating a relic of Rowena Ravenclaw..."

"And what happens when he's killed, Prof - or not killed? Are these Horcruxes - shouldn't that be Horcruces? - are they just like, like so many tent-pegs, pegging the seventh bit of soul to earth and preventing it from crossing over, or are they actual back-ups? When he's killed and he comes back to life, are there still the same number of Horcruces there were before, and the same bit of soul is still in his body, or does the bit in his body get set free and one of the Horcruces gets used _up_, and the bit of soul that was in it gets used to re-animate his body?"

"It must be the first, mustn't it?" Harry chimed in. "We know that after I - after he killed my mum he was like this, disembodied _thing_ drifting about, so doesn't that mean that the bit of soul that was in his body got left behind when his body was destroyed?"

"It could do," Severus said thoughtfully, "but it could equally well mean He was killed, both body and soul, and then a piece of soul from a Horcrux was brought into play with the intention that it re-animate His corpse, and it became the drifting parasite which you saw because it found there was no body left to revive."

"So," Lynsey said. "Logically, there could be as many as five Horcruces left to find, including this locket which you say you know how to lay hands on, or at the other extreme, if snake-features hadn't managed to make the Ravenclaw Horcrux before Harry here blew him up, and if he simply failed to make one at Godric's Hollow and Harry _isn't_ a Horcrux, and if one of the ones he'd already made was used up when he pseudo-died..."

"...then there could be as few as two," the professor finished for her. "Nagini and either Slytherin's locket or Hufflepuff's cup, depending on which of the existing Horcruces was used up when His original body was destroyed." He pulled a bitter face.

"But He - He's known for three years that Lucius allowed the diary to be destroyed; He may well know that a Horcrux was used up in restoring Him to life, if indeed that is the case; and thanks to me He now knows that the ring Horcrux was destroyed too so He could in fact have already made more, or be planning to. If - even if you _are_ a Horcrux, Potter, if He doesn't know that you are, and He has already set out to replace those which were destroyed, there could be as few as two left to find or there could be as many as six in addition to yourself."

"Oh joy," Harry muttered. "You're really good at this cheerful optimism thing, you know that, sir?"

"There is one thing, though," Lynsey said, frowning. "If killing him does actually use up a Horcrux, then perhaps you could get the Horcruxes out of Harry and Nagini just by killing snake-face lots of times until he used them up. So long as you did them like, really close together, so you knew he didn't have time to make a replacement in between."

"You are talking," Severus said balefully, "about one of the most powerful wizards in recorded history. Killing Him even once will be an almost insurmountable task: just how do you propose to kill Him several times in quick succession?"

"Machine-gun?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I'll tell you one thing for damned sure" the professor said grimly, after Harry had left; "if I do have to kill Potter, which God forbid, I'm taking myself along with him - either to death or to somewhere abroad where the Ministry won't find me."

"You think the Ministry would be... less than understanding?"

"If I killed The Boy Who Lived, after being 'let off' as they see it for killing Dumbledore? Not even Minerva and Horace and all their works would save me. They'd fucking _crucify_ me, nearly literally, and I am not going back to Azkaban. Not at any price. Nor do I wish to find out the hard way whether or not Dementors really destroy souls or just..."

"...send them out naked, neither properly alive nor properly dead," Lynsey finished sombrely. "In which case, I could at least walk the other world until I found you, although whether I could put you back into your body again is moot and I also have no urge to find out the hard way. But pet - if they _did_ send you back to Azkaban, there are still the contingency plans which Harry and Remus worked out to spring you with if Minerva failed, and they were pretty good plans - especially the one with Peeves."

"You think Lupin would still be willing to - to spring me, as you put it, if I killed Potter - even knowing that it was at his own request?"

"Oh yes - he's _your_ dog."

He looked at her dubiously for a moment and then nodded abruptly. "I suppose it's a point in our favour that the Ministry never did find out about our... secret weapon. Hard as it is to imagine Dobby in that light."

"That's the beauty of it though, isn't it? Nobody, hardly, thinks of house elves like that and yet they're such... sinister little brutes, really. I mean, I like Dobby - but I'd hate to be on the wrong side of him."

"Talking about being on the wrong side of people, I'm relieved to see that Minerva has at least provided us with separate beds; even if they are suspiciously close together."

"She said she had to put us together because there weren't enough rooms to go around, but I'm not sure I believe her - in a place this size."

"Minerva is a wretched conniving old lech."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The second day, he came silently, shepherded by Neville Longbottom who pulled an anxious face at Lynsey through the door. She nodded to the boy almost imperceptibly before touching her fingertips to her friend's elbow. "Prof?" He gave her a blank, blind look and groped his way unsteadily to the couch, almost as if he really was blinded. She poured him a brandy without asking, and he downed it in one violent swallow.

"They were asking him questions," Neville said quietly, "about - about what You-Know-Who wanted to know."

"I can make my own bloody excuses, Longbottom," the professor snarled, clutching the brandy-glass in an unsteady hand. Nestor jumped up on the couch beside him and nosed thoughtfully at his knee.

The boy winced, but didn't back down. "It's not excuses, is it, sir, just - explanations."

"And what does _that_ bloody mean, pray?"

"He means there's nothing that needs excusing," Lynsey said, sitting down on the couch next to him and rubbing Nestor's back absently. "You've done nothing wrong." She exchanged a small smile with Neville, who nodded, pulled the door to and presumably departed.

Severus slumped back against the couch and shut his eyes, and she nipped the glass from his slackening fingers before he could drop it and set it on the table, very softly. "Are they giving you a hard time about it, pet?"

He shook his head slightly, without opening his eyes. "No I - not that. Most of them are - are being quite - considerate. Surprizingly so. I suppose they - since He shamed me by letting them all hear me, like _that_, begging and, and pleading they think that I am... fragile." His mouth tightened wryly. "I should resent their pity, but it's - better than the scorn that I expected, and under the circumstances I'll take all the pity I can get."

"So what...?"

"It's the - they do need me to relive it, there's no other way, I have to go over it and over it, what they, I mean Lucius and that lot, what they asked me, what I told them, what their response was and it's so hard to keep out the images of _why_ I told them, of what they did to, to make me." He opened his eyes then and looked at her, troubled and deadly-tired but at least, she thought, he wasn't shutting her out, and she could see focus and feeling in those black eyes. "Alastor wants me to use a Pensieve so they can see for themselves, assess every nuance of every bloody question and in some ways that would be easier, but I don't - oh, God, I don't want them to see me like that, especially the, the sexual aspect of it."

"What about Minerva?"

He rubbed wearily at the bridge of his nose. "Oh, Minerva has been very - kind. It's not that... They are, most of them, treating me as a leader not a, a supplicant, they're not - bullying me, exactly..."

"No - you're just bullying yourself!"

"More or less." He gave her a tired flash of a grin. "Minerva is the only one who has the authority to stop me. She called a halt to the meeting and pretty-much sent me upstairs to bed because she could see that I was - flagging a bit."

"Thanks the gods for Minerva, then."

"Yes. But I do have to - I do have to go through with it. You can see that, can't you?"

"Yes. You are not in any way to blame, I think, for having told your secrets, given the... the circumstances. But as their leader you have to do everything in your power to limit the damage irrespective of whether it was your fault, and to a very advanced degree irrespective of how much it hurts you to do so. But you should also pace yourself, and be as - as nice to yourself as possible to help yourself to get through it, not beat yourself up about it."

His face twisted suddenly. "How can I - how can I be leader, Lynsey, to people who heard me - begging for mercy, so - so completely unmanned -?"

"Remus doesn't see a problem with it, and wolves have a very good instinct for what makes an alpha..." She looked at his drawn face and sighed. "Oh, listen. There was this laird in the Scottish Borders, Johnny Armstrong, in the sixteenth century, and he was a reiver - a kind of political cattle-thief - and not submissive enough, too much of a Power in his own right, so the King of Scots... according to tradition, anyway, the King of Scots invited him to what was supposed to be a neutral parley, and then arrested him and his men and hangit - hanged them."

"It sounds like the sort of thing the Ministry would do - but what has it to do with me?"

"There was a song written about it, very close to the event; a song that put words into Armstrong's mouth, although I don't know if they were really his. And he - in the song, he pleaded for mercy for himself and for his men - through about ten verses! - and the song says:

"To seik het water beneth cauld yce,  
Surely it is a great folie;  
I half asked grace at a graceless face,  
But there is nane for my men and me.

"And Armstrong - he's seen as a great hero, you understand, and nobody that wrote the song or that sang it thought any ill of him for having begged; only for having wasted time asking for mercy from a man that had none."

Severus nodded curtly, the lines of his face austerely calm; but she saw him swallow, and a suspicious glitter behind his thick eyelashes, and the lines of another verse came into her head, about the man who "... poised between shocking falls on razor-edge / Has taught himself this balancing subterfuge / Of the accosting profile, the erect carriage."

Suddenly restless and frustrated, she stood up, ignoring Nestor's beep of protest, and began to pace. "It makes me so _angry_," she said, almost inconsequentially, "the kind of feminist who thinks that men have no complex emotions, who makes jokes about it. It's so - fucking unfair."

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "You think men might aspire to the same... _depths_ of rampant emotionalism as women?"

"Tchah. Don't tease."

"Why not? You do."

"I'm serious. I know they _say_ - say that studies have shown that men are less good at expressing emotion than women but even that has to be nurture, not nature, surely? Auden was probably the greatest writer of emotion in the English language and it's not just a, a Gay Thing, because his nearest rival is Donne who was as straight as a ruler."

"Isn't it some sort of literary sacrilege, to ignore the pre-eminent claim of Shakespeare?"

"Shakespeare had a lovely turned of phrase but he was constrained by the need to be commercial, to play to the grand-stand - I don't think he captured the... _delicacy_ of emotion as well as Auden or Donne. And in any case - another bloke, isn't it?"

"You're committing heresy, you know that, don't you? Even in my world, it's heretical to suggest that a wizard's feelings might be as - as fine as a witch's."

"It's depressing, is what it is." She sat down again and Nestor jumped into her lap, pinning her to the couch. She wondered idly where his brother had got to. "It's been my experience... You know, or maybe you don't know, that men tend to occupy the extremes in intelligence, so that most geniuses are male, and so are the great majority of patients who have learning difficulties so severe they can't function independently. It's probably to do with having the unpaired X-chromosome - men have a higher chance of expressing recessive genes, if you know what that means."

"I know a bit - enough to follow you, I think."

"Right, well, it's been my experience that men tend to the extremes in a lot of things. So most of the great monsters in history have been male - I mean you do get your Elizabeth B?horys - "

"Or your Bellatrix Lestranges."

"Quite. But, on the whole, most homicidal nutters tend to be male - the ones that get caught, anyway. But so, in my experience, are most of the truly saintly. Women are usually much too cynical and hard-boiled for that - that real sweetness of temperament, that flawless sincerity. And in the same way, if you took a trawl of the most insensitive, emotionally blind oicks in any given town four-fifths of them would be male but so would most of the really emotionally aware and vulnerable people be, too."

"Looking back on my own Slytherins, I can certainly say that most of the obnoxiously over-confident brats were boys, and so were the ones who huddled in corners and had to be coaxed out with peppermints. The girls are usually - so much older, one way or another."

"'xactly." She grinned at him suddenly. "There is one feminist joke about men that always tickles me, though - I think because there really is some truth in it, and also because it's not unkind - or at least, it's unkind to both sexes equally." She reached for the laptop, which was currently on a side-table within reach, and had a brief rummage around in Yahoo before passing it over to him. "Here you are."

The professor gazed at the screen, its dull glow underlighting his bony face and making him look even more dramatic than usual.

"How to Please a Woman: Compliment her; respect her; honour her; cuddle her; caress her; love her; kiss her; stroke her; buy things for her; tease her; comfort her; protect her; hug her; hold her; spend money on her; wine and dine her; listen to her; care for her; stand by her; support her; hold her.

"How to Please a Man: Show up naked. Bring beer."

"It would certainly be a great time-saver," he murmured.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

After dinner they went out together, into the gathering dusk, to call Starbuck in from the fields at the back of the house. Across the valley, the long stone legs of an aqueduct strode across the slope, and it was possible to make out a barge moving slowly across it, suspended between earth and sky.

As Lynsey yodelled her cat's name across the long grass, she became aware that somehow she and Severus were holding hands. He noticed it in the same breath and drew back, looking unnerved, and she smiled at him sadly.

"You know I fancy you, but I promise I'm not going to - to stop liking you or anything, if you don't reciprocate."

"It's - kind of you to say so, but I know that if I... There must be a strict limit to the time that I will be able to remain staying with you, if we are not - not engaged in a - physical relationship. Otherwise I would feel that I was - well - standing in the way of you finding a true partner."

"Oh, gods, _don't_ feel that you have to shag me in order to pay for your bed - that's ghastly."

"It's not - not only that. To be partners would seem like a - a sensible arrangement on both sides. If it's truly what you want. I just don't know if I - if I can."

"Gods, the romance," Lynsey muttered, and Severus flashed her one of his there-and-gone smirks.

"I don't do 'romance', I thought you'd have noticed that by now."

"I'm not exactly a hearts and flowers type myself, that's one of the reasons... Do you want to be able to?"

"I think so. Probably. Maybe."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Later, in the darkness, when he cried out in his sleep and stirred restlessly, Lynsey thought she understood why Minerva had made them share a room. Cautiously, not certain whether it was a good move or not, she clasped one of his long hands in hers, and after a moment he came awake and looked at her, sleepy and serious.

"I never know," she said, "whether it's a good idea to touch you when you're dreaming, or not."

"Everybody," he said drowsily, "from my father onwards, taught me that being touched would hurt. It's only really you and Poppy ever touched me in a way that healed - though I'd never tell _her_ that. She's far too bossy as it is."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

On the third day, she missed him at the communal lunch. Abandoning an interestingly techie conversation about daisy-wheel printers with Arthur and leaving her soup and bread to go cold, she went in search of him, and found him in the library, sitting with a book clenched in his long fingers and his head bowed in an attitude of quiet despair. As she stepped through the door he glanced up and gave her a tight flicker of a smile which did not reach the eyes, and then looked away again. Without asking, she went and stood behind his chair, reading over his shoulder.

It was an anthology of modern British poetry. Squinting, she made out the words:

"A lost thing could I never find,  
Nor a broken thing mend:  
And I fear I shall be all alone  
When I get towards the end.  
Who will there be to comfort me  
Or who will be my friend?"

...and then further down the page, to the end of the piece:

"I will hold my house in the high wood  
Within a walk of the sea,  
And the men that were boys when I was a boy  
Shall sit and drink with me."

Lynsey let her breath out slowly and carefully, and felt Severus shift in protest as she gripped his shoulder so tightly that her fingers dug into him. "Pet - you do have friends, even - even boyhood ones. Remus - "

"Remus was my tormentor," he said harshly, "not my friend. He may be - an ally of sorts now but we're hardly going to sit down to an evening of fond reminiscences of how he jeered and - and baited me and nearly bloody-well _ate_ me, are we?"

"I'm sorry; I didn't mean..."

"He still holds the bastards' memories dear, he won't admit that they - and the boys who _were_ my friends, or that I thought were my friends, they grew up to be worse than bloody Black and bloody Potter, so I sold them down the line and they repaid me by..." He made a wide, inclusive gesture, indicating his own body, his lamed feet, and Lynsey flinched away from the memory (flayed bones and tendons showing whitely through bloody ruin...).

"Oh, listen," she said, "you can have... Your life may not have turned out the way you would have wanted, but whose does? A house in the high woods and a parlour full of old schoolfriends would be nice but you can still have... other things just as good. Things that are interesting and - and worthy and of value. Things that are yours. And you won't have to be alone..."

He turned his head slightly, brushing her fingers with the side of his sharp jaw, and she returned the gesture by stroking the back of her fingers across his cheek. "Never have to live alone unless you want to."

"The white light just made it worse," he said, as if he had already begun the conversation long before. "It was like being in the Caves again, hung up - you know how, stark bollock naked with my bloody shoulders ripping out of their sockets and - When I was in Azkaban... before, when I was twenty-one, they kept me in the dark, I could hardly see my hand in front of my face, not that I wanted to after they - " He made a strange self-protective gesture, tucking his hands in against his chest as if to shield them, and Lynsey winced. "Cells in Azkaban usually are dark, I could have dealt with that better, but I think some bastard saw I didn't like bright light and chose it just for me; it would be just bloody like them."

Lynsey shivered. "Bastards."

"I am so - _tired_ of being punished, Lynsey," Severus said quietly, leaning back into the chair with his head tipped back and his eyes closed; a gesture of infinite weariness. "And I was so - glad when Dobby showed up, I can't tell you." Lynsey shifted to stand directly behind him, her hands lying loosely across his shoulders, listening to that quiet, steady voice. "Even though there were no Dementors to claw at my sanity this time around, I was - I had been - absolutely crushed", he said, "by the weight of memory and by feeling... by expecting that that was how I was to die. Like that. That I would die completely alone, after maybe a century of isolation and scorn and sheer screaming boredom; that I would never, never hear a friendly word - or even an insult! - spoken to me again and then Dobby popped up like a bloody leprechaun, all toothy grin and flapping ears and 'Master Severus' this and that, and it felt - it really did feel as if my heart was going to burst out of my chest in pure bloody relief. And it wasn't - it wasn't even necessary, was it, I mean Minerva would have got me out anyway, wouldn't she? - it wasn't even to free me, to get me back to the Order, it was just to, to make me _feel_ better while I was waiting."

"I wouldn't call that unnecessary, pet - we wouldn't have left you in such a state an hour longer than we had to." Carefully, so as not to startle him, she slid her hands back to the sides of his neck and began to work her thumbs into the knots she could feel burning under his skin.

"Ah!" He turned his head from side to side, loosening the tired muscles. "If I live to be a thousand I will never be able to thank you enough for putting so much effort into caring how I _felt_, as opposed to what use I could be."

"It's not really me you should be thanking - I mean, I cared, yes, very much, but the practical bit was mainly down to Remus and Harry. They both seem to have this attitude that - well, there was never any question of obeying the Ministry's rules or going through official channels or, or anything 'lawful' like that - just this assumption that the Ministry and the rules were there to be worked around, like a boulder on a footpath. Never any 'Should we?' - just 'How do we?', coupled with this profound sense that rules only happen to other people."

The professor gave a sharp snort of laughter. "Oh, God, I do so know what you mean. As Remus's classmate and Harry's teacher I've cursed them both for it a thousand times over - but now I suppose I'll have to bless them for it!"

* * *

**Author's note:**

I very rarely dream, or at least I very rarely remember doing so: perhaps three or four times in a year. I could probably count on my fingers - certainly on my fingers and toes - the number of times in my life that I've had anything you could call a nightmare, and on those rare occasions when I do I am always behaving competently in the dream, and generally defeat, or at least stall, any monsters. This morning (28th December) I dreamed that _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ was out and that it was clear from the first few pages that Snape would be dead by the end of the book: and that, for perhaps the first time in my life, left me so frightened and confused that I couldn't get back to sleep, or even stop shaking, for about a quarter of an hour. This, despite having suffered several genuine bereavements in Real Life. Somehow, Snape just feels so extraordinarily real, for a fictional character, that the idea of him dying is horrifying.

"...I see at last that all the knowledge..." - last few lines of the poem _90 North_ by Randall Jarrell.

A mouldywarp is an old English dialect word for a mole.

"Chum" is a rather old-fashioned British slang word for a friend; we don't use "friend" as a verb, as I gather Americans sometimes do, but "chum" can be used as a verb in constructions such as "I'll chum you to the shops". Pedigree Chum is a very famous British brand of dog-food, and part of the reason that "chum" meaning friend is now rare is probably because the word has come to be so inextricably linked with the product.

Lech - contraction of lecher.

For the benefit of those who find the Scots puzzling:

"To seek hot water beneath cold ice,  
Surely it is a great folly;  
I have asked grace at a graceless face,  
But there is none for my men and me."

[To "ask grace at a graceless face" being to ask for mercy from someone with a merciless expression.

"But poised between shocking falls on razor-edge" - from the poem _Watch Any Day_ by WH Auden.

Elizabeth B?hory was, at least according to repute, a prolific Hungarian serial killer, circa 1600, who murdered numerous girls and young women in order to bathe in their blood, in the hopes that it would preserve her youth.

"A lost thing could I never find" - from the poem _The South Country_ by Hilaire Belloc.

When Lynsey refers to Harry and Remus's actions as not being "lawful" she is using the term as it is used in the r?e-playing game _Dungeons and Dragons_, to mean a person who is inclined to follow orderly routines and go through organized channels. _D&D_ splits character-traits along two axes, GoodEvil and LawfulChaotic, and this often turns out to be a useful way of analysing people in real life.

The HGSS story _Lost and Found_ which I am co-writing with Dyce under the joint ID **Borolin** also updated recently, on 23rd December. I don't know if readers will already be aware of this as the email-notices bot at ffn appears to be broken - again.

In the light of the new canon revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, this chapter has been re-edited to make Severus call Dumbledore "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", to make Severus twenty-one rather than twenty-two when he was investigated by the Wizengamot, and to leave it open whether the curse on the Peverell ring belonged to the Horcrux or to the ring itself.


	13. 12 Misty Watercolour Memories

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**N.B.:** Because of the recent failure of the ffn story alerts, some readers may have missed reading the previous chapter, which was uploaded on 28th December.

* * *

**12: MISTY WATERCOLOUR MEMORIES**  
((_In which the past bears examination._))

"Let it be Filius and only Filius, then, if it must be anybody."

"Very well, Severus, but might I ask...?"

He ducked his head and stared down at his hands, avoiding Minerva's eye. "It seems easier," he said carefully; "less - shaming, to be seen like - that - if I must be seen, by somebody who... who isn't entirely human. And I won't have it be Lupin: he wants me to be his alpha wolf, if you can believe that, and I couldn't - how could I be, be that to him if I couldn't even look him in the eye?" His mouth tightened dryly. "A question which hardly arises with Filius."

Minerva gave a ladylike snort. "Nor with Hagrid either."

"Indeed. But Hagrid... Hagrid isn't as well-equipped to assess the information as Filius is, and besides he - he would pity me too openly. Whereas Filius - I'm a child to him in any case, so I don't have to feel so... lessened, by having him witness my total bloody degradation."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Filius is the dwarf, isn't he?"

"No."

"Oh. But isn't he...?" She held her hand out at waist-height, palm-down.

"Yes, but he's not a dwarf: he's part goblin."

"Ah. I should have guessed." She looked at Severus dubiously where he sat pressed firmly back into the armchair. He for his part was wearing a determinedly neutral expression, but his grip on the chair's arms was like iron and he was shuddering gently. "Would you like a drink? Tea or...?"

He nodded jerkily. "Coffee, please."

When he had wrapped his long fingers around the warming mug, Lynsey perched on the edge of the couch, since the cats had already taken most of it. They seemed to have settled in well and to be enjoying their unexpected holiday, now, although initially it had taken several hours to coax Nestor out from under the furniture. "What's it like," she said diffidently, "taking part of your memory out like that?"

"Draughty." He took a thoughtful sip at the mug, shivered suddenly and violently and then settled again, the shuddering becoming less marked. "It's not that I don't know what I ought to remember: I know intellectually that I - that they asked me questions, and I told them. To buy ten minutes without pain. I still remember that - _that_ voice, counting the seconds away before it would all - start again, I remember that - _terror_, hearing the seconds counted away, trying to cling on to the moment as it slipped away from me; but not the shame and desperation I know intellectually that I felt as I betrayed the Order with my own mouth or the, the sense of invasion as that _creature_ cracked my mind open and rummaged about in it. That part, the emotion that went with the memories I gave to Filius, that's all just - neutral. Greyed out."

He grimaced. "You understand that I - that I gave Filius the minimum portion of my memories that I could, and still have him see what they asked me."

"I would have thought you would be glad to get the whole thing out of your head for a while."

"But the more I take out, the more I'll have to put back later, which is - it brings it all to the surface so much more bloody vividly. And I didn't want to risk even Filius seeing any more of what they did to me, what they made of me, than is strictly necessary. Quite apart from the fact that - well, it's going to take him the best part of a day just to view what's there, even once, as well as the time taken to analyse it. He's a sentimental creature at the best of times, in any case, always getting tearful over things he can't bloody-well help; I don't know what he'd do if I made him watch seventeen days of bloody - agony just to pick out the few hours that were actually relevant to anything important."

He took another sip of coffee, looking at Lynsey seriously over the rim. "I worked the exact time out, you see, when I was in Azkaban. Seventeen days. It's not much, really, is it? I don't know what I would feel if I took out the whole memory of those seventeen days. Calmer, I suppose, but - like my own ghost. As it is... even taking out part of the memory, the part where I spilled my secrets, it leaves me less - burningly ashamed, even though I know intellectually that I should be, but I feel... raw. Scraped thin."

"Like the crater after you clean out an abscess?"

"Just like that, yes."

"Would it be worth my while to point out that you _shouldn't_ be ashamed?"

He flashed her a tired smile. "Probably not."

"It's a pity that they didn't - well, that when they, they all heard you being - you know, that they didn't hear what you said when you were questioned. But I suppose even Snake-Features isn't stupid enough for that."

"No. He - He didn't want them to know how much He knew. Stupid, I suppose, since they all thought that I - that I was a traitor and would have told Him everything I knew in any case, but He - He muffled my voice when I was - answering. Just not when I was bloody - begging." He took a sudden swig of the coffee, swallowed it down and gave her a mocking look. "They _did_ hear me pleading with you to finish me, or so I'm told, which is why when they stopped hearing me they thought that you'd... obliged me."

"And I can't tell you how glad I am that I didn't have to." She could feel her own mouth tightening at the surge of memory, the image of his desperate anguish, and tried to school her face into calmness. She could so easily have failed to save him - so easily have had to leave him there in misery and blood.

"Mm," he replied noncommittally, and she wondered if he was glad too - but if he was, he wasn't admitting to it. She hoped that that was all it was.

When he had drunk most of the coffee, he set it aside and hunched forwards, elbows on knees, staring at his own hands.

"It's - hard," he said, in a soft, steady voice, "to think of even Filius seeing me - like that. Stripped, violated, pleading - I don't know which I fear worse: his disgust, or his pity." He turned slightly to look at Lynsey, his bony face showing pale and wan through his straggling hair. "Even with you - you didn't see the worst of it but even knowing that you heard me begging and screaming, that you saw me naked - I don't know how to be with you. I don't know how to have any dignity with you."

"Huh," she said, with a little huff of desperate laughter. "We'll just have to see to it that you get used to me seeing you naked, then, and then it won't seem so unusual."

Severus blinked at her, caught between angst and amusement. After a moment amusement evidently won, as one eyebrow climbed almost into his hairline. "I can't imagine why you should want to," he said dryly. "I would have thought that what you'd seen already would be more than enough to put any sensible person off from wanting to see it again."

"Did I ever claim to be sensible?"

"I suppose not," he muttered, dropping his gaze, "and the fact that you are - or claim to be - interested in me just proves it."

"Oh, hush." She reached out tentatively and rested her hand on his. After a moment he closed his fingers around hers, and looked up at her enquiringly. She smiled at him. "I know you think I have peculiar tastes," she said lightly, "but I, personally, rather like your nose, we can work on the hair and the hairy legs we'll just have to live with, unless you plan to take up shaving them."

"I shall do no such thing!"

"Well, then. You have courage and character; a brilliant mind and quite a good bod, if a little on the scrawny side; a sexy voice; beautiful hands and arms and you move like a cat. What more could a girl ask for? Everybody's got _some_thing about them that's less than ideal."

"I'm never sure, with you, whether I'm being flattered or teased. It's - " He gave her fingers a squeeze. "Oh, damn. It's an appealing idea, it really is, but you know that I - I grew up associating being touched with being hit, and then Lucius - "

"You said the other night that Poppy and I could both touch you in a way that healed."

"Yes, but - I don't know if that would hold true in a, a sexual context." He stood up abruptly, letting go of her hand, and turned his back, clutching his arms defensively across his chest. "I _want_ to be, to be able to be touched" he said in a rather thick voice, "but I don't know if I could stand it. I'm afraid I might just be - numb, dumb, obedient, the way I was with Lucius and, and Bellatrix and Macnair; or I might end up like Nestor, metaphorically hiding under the wardrobe and hissing."

"If you do, I promise to coax you out with a nice saucer of warm milk."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Life, however, went on. As tense as the professor was, he still had his brainstorming sessions to attend (although he insisted sourly that there was far more storm than brain involved, especially where Alastor Moody was concerned), and he and Hermione Granger between them had commenced brewing another batch of Wolfsbane in the pantry. Lynsey, likewise, still had the laptop and her mundane work.

When she heard footsteps coming up the passage, however, she set work aside gladly and went to meet Severus. He was talking animatedly to a short, fat, elderly man with an improbable moustache, a gleaming bald pate and a retro-camp taste in clothes.

As she approached them her friend looked up and gave her a brief flicker of a smile. "Ah, Lynsey. This is Horace Slughorn, who was my Head of House when I was a callow student instead of a teacher."

"Pleased to meet you," she said, vaguely holding out her hand to be shaken, but instead the rotund little man seized it and raised it to his lips.

"Charmed, to be sure," he murmured, gazing at her shrewdly with misty-green, slightly protuberant eyes which looked as old as the ocean. The last time she had seen a look like that, it had been on an auctioneer weighing up the value of a suspect painting.

Still, she knew that her professor to some extent owed his freedom from Azkaban (and hence his sanity, if you could call it that) to this man and his network of contacts, so she was cautiously well-disposed towards him. "Ah - hello," she said rather warily, reclaiming her hand. As if some switch had been thrown, he suddenly beamed at her, causing the ridiculous 'tache to waggle up and down. Evidently, she thought, her brushwork had been deemed authentic.

"And you would be the delightful young lady who helped Severus to escape from He Who Must Not Be Named." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Severus wince slightly.

"Um - yes."

"Most impressive. Do you know," he said chattily, "I don't believe I've ever spoken to a Muggle, well, _socially_ before."

"I'd never spoken to a wizard socially before I met Severus: not that I know of, anyhow."

"To be sure, to be sure." He waggled his walrus moustache at her again. "But I'm very grateful, my dear: very grateful that you were able to help Severus to get away from that place."

"We helped each other" Lynsey replied rather uncomfortably. "I'm sure I'd never have got out of there alive on my own." Over Horace's head, she exchanged an uneasy, embarrassed look with Severus himself.

"Doesn't surprize me. I knew Severus had star quality from his very first Potions class, and I am never wrong about these things."

"_Aren't_ you Horace?" the professor said, baring his teeth in sudden spite. "I seem to remember you thought the same thing about darling Lucius - and Tom Riddle."

The old man winced slightly, but rallied with spirit. "I'll not deny that they both - applied their talents in unfortunate directions. But that they _had_ talent - no, Severus, you can't deny me that, and you can't deny your own worth to me either. You've always been one of the gems of my collection: a bit of a rough diamond, perhaps, but a diamond nevertheless."

Lynsey found herself warming to the man considerably - but then he spoilt the moment, all unknowingly, by adding: "I know that he - well, that he became a monster, in the end, but when you were boys I always thought it was to Lucius's credit that he took such an interest in you. Few pure-bloods - " - and stopped, seeing the blood drain from the professor's face to leave it chalk white, with two flags of violent red on the cheeks. "What is it?"

"Nothing," Severus said tightly.

Slughorn gave him the same assessing look he had earlier given to Lynsey. "Tell me," he said softly.

"No."

"Tell me."

"Lucius," Severus ground out through set teeth, turning his face aside and down and refusing to look his former Head of House in the eye. "His interest - not - benign."

"What, then?"

"Use your _fucking_ - imagination. Literally."

The older man turned almost as white as his former student. "I..." he said lamely, his gigantic moustache drooping. "He... I had no idea."

"No." The professor dragged his head round with a visible effort, to meet the other man's eyes. "Not your doing," he muttered. "Like Tom, Lucius is very - plausible. He had me believing for years that it was my fault."

"No, no, it - I'm sure it wasn't. You were so young... If anyone was to blame other than Lucius himself then I - but as you say, he was - he seemed so - well, so refined..."

"Effortlessly superior? Above molesting little boys - especially a common little guttersnipe like me?"

"Ah..."

"He got off on that, you know. He thought he was really - slumming it."

"I am - so sorry. If you had told me - "

"Would you have believed me?"

"I - I'd like to think so."

"So would I. But he had made me so - ashamed. I was just his 'bit of rough', he made me feel so bloody dirty, and it would only have been his word against mine anyway."

"Hardly." The moustache, which seemed to have a life of its own, bristled out like a scrubbing-brush. "I would have invited him to my study for a pleasant chat about his career, and laced his brandy with Veritaserum."

"God - would you have done that, for me? You could have been sacked - "

"Oh no - get the dosage right, get the questioning right and I flatter myself he'd never even have known."

"I should have told you." He thumped his fist against the wall in sudden fury. "I should have - fucking - told you."

"You should, yes, but you said it yourself, Severus - Lucius is very... plausible, and you know I speak as an expert. You mustn't blame yourself for being taken in by him."

Severus gave a shaky laugh. "I suppose we both were - just as we were both taken in by Tom."

"D'you think that he - Draco?"

"Not so far as I know. He treats the boy like an indulged but slightly stupid pet, which does him no good service, but he doesn't actually - abuse him. Unless he does it and then feels so guilty afterwards that he showers him with presents, but - no, I don't believe so."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What a strange bloke. He made me feel as if he was examining me under a microscope to see if I'd pass muster: but he seems to be genuinely fond of you."

"I believe he is: as strange as that may seem. Horace is... well, like a man who owns racing Hippogriffs. He's ruthless about choosing his 'stable', he only ever takes an interest in students who have either talent or connections, who he thinks will be high-flyers - but once he's picked them, he's genuinely fond of them and he takes pleasure in their achievements. And I've never known him to drop somebody once he'd properly taken them up, unless they - well, let's say Lucius would be dropped from a very great height at this point, if he hadn't already dropped him for turning out to be a Death Eater." He was still even paler than usual, but had lost that deadly chalk-and-flame, livid pallor.

"Like a racehorse owner - yes, I could see that. And probably the main benefit he gets from it is pride in his own ability to pick a winner, rather than actual monetary gain."

"Yes. He does get some mundane gain from it as well - little presents and so on - but I think it's mainly the pleasure of the game which attracts him. And - well, I've never known anybody to come away worse-off from knowing him. That is... I do know for a fact that he tricked Hagrid out of some very valuable spider-venom, but it was a thing Hagrid would never have used or sold in any case, and Hagrid got a convivial evening and some rather fine wine out of it. And his favourites at school - I'm the only one I know who came off worse because of it, and that only because I was _stupid_ enough to fall under Lucius's influence, after I met him there. And even in my case - it's possible Lucius would have noticed me anyway, even if we hadn't both been in the Slug Club."

"You are very - noticeable. In a good way."

"On the whole I'd rather not be, believe me."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She had been aware of Filius Flitwick since the first day here. He hadn't been among the group in the Lake District at New Year - she was sure she would have remembered him if he had been - but here he was noticeable as one of the adult Order members who was most friendly towards Severus, along with Remus, Minerva and Arthur and the half-giant Hagrid, who had put in a brief appearance on the second day.

He was also the only Order member who seemed to have a sweeter tooth than Severus - as well as being energetic, enthusiastic and not more than three feet tall, with an upstanding shock of white hair which gave him the appearance of an elderly cockatoo. He had presence, though - squeaky presence, but presence - and Lynsey had no urge to laugh when he neatly separated her from the professor after lunch, and cornered her in the corridor.

He had a steely blue-grey eye, a little rheumed by age, perhaps, but still penetrating, and his face, what she could see of it from this angle, was careworn and sad. She remembered noticing that he had hardly touched his food today: not surprising, considering what he had been viewing.

"Professor Flitwick," she said cautiously, and his lined face lifted into a smile of great sweetness. With his fringe of beard, he reminded her a little of the dwarf called Marmaduke Scarlet in a book she had read as a child.

"Oh, call me Filius, do." He blinked at her and sighed. "I must apologize for accosting you like this, but I just wanted to ask you - well, how Severus is coping."

"I'm not being funny, but why does everybody ask me that, instead of asking him?"

"Because he is the last person who would answer that particular question honestly," the little man replied with some asperity. "I know that this matter of the Pensieve is stressful for him, and after witnessing him in the hands of those - giggling degenerates I am even more concerned for him than I was."

Lynsey nodded tiredly. "He is - still functioning. Just about."

"That's what I was afraid of." He pulled a wry, regretful face, and Lynsey thought she saw a liquid glimmer of tears in his eyes. "So much suffering... do make sure he knows that if - if there is anything I can do to help him, anything at all, I will gladly do it."

"I'll tell him, I promise. Just knowing that you've made the offer may do him some good. You know he expects that you'll despise him for having - well, lost his self-control in front of those creeps?"

Filius sighed and raised his heavy white eyebrows in exasperation. "He always was a silly boy. Clever, you know, but silly."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When she got back to their room it was to find Severus already ensconced, demonstrating the laptop to a fascinated Arthur Weasley. She slipped through the door quietly and sat down on the couch, not wanting to interrupt them unless he made an egregious error.

"A bit like a diagnostic spell, yes," he was saying patiently. "It doesn't have a real brain, as such, but it can respond to questions with verbal answers. And a bit like a chess-piece; it can be made to behave as if it's thinking, but it isn't really. It's just been primed with instructions on how to look as if it is."

"And this all runs on - on lightning?"

"On the same sort of energy that makes lightning, yes. The same sort of stuff you get when you stroke a cat and get sparks."

"And you use that little ball thing to move the arrow around and point it at these pictures of buttons? And you can - change the instructions? Like telling the chess-piece where to move?"

"Or like tweaking a set of wards that are already in place, yes. Using a special language - like using Latin for spells, only this is one especially written for the machine. Look, I'll show you."

Several busy seconds followed, filled only with the staccato clicks of the keyboard, and then Arthur suddenly leapt from his chair with a sharp yelp and shot several paces backwards. "What?" Severus snapped irritably, his face bathed in the light from the screen.

"That - that thing, you said it it wasn't conscious, that it didn't have a real brain or or know who was using it - "

"Yes - what of it?"

"Then why did it say 'Install wizard'?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What did Filius want, earlier on?"

"To find out how you were - from an unbiased source."

"Wants to see if I'm going to crack up and be a _nuisance_?" he jibed, his thin lips drawing back into a snarl.

"He's concerned about you, you daft bleeder. He said to tell you that - well, that if there was anything he could do to, um, to help, he would. Willingly."

"Help me with what, pray?"

"With not cracking up - presumably."

"And that's the assumption, is it? That I'm going mad?"

"People are just - aware that you've been under a lot of pressure. Even more so than usual, I mean. And Filius - well, what with him having actually seen - " She stopped, seeing his bone-deep flinch. Hesitated. Went on. "He's just - been given a strong reminder of just how much stress you've been under, is all."

"Huh." He drew a deep, unsteady breath. "I suppose it was inevitable that he would - pity me more than he blames me. He always was a sentimental fool."

"It's not - not pity I think. Not in that... lessening sense, anyway. Just concern. Affection, even."

"Affection!"

"Why not? You're fond of him, aren't you?"

"I'd never really thought about it. I suppose - maybe. Yes."

"Well, then. And no, it's not 'different' when it's the other way around."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The situation might be stressful but at least the venue was pleasant. After an awkward dinner at which Severus studiously avoided looking at Filius at all, they sat out on the veranda with Remus Lupin, cracking nuts and drinking port, courtesy of Horace Slughorn.

Remus had been taking the opportunity to do some more painting, and had an easel set up with a view of the aquaduct, which in his vision of it seemed to stalk across the landscape on long, thin legs. The cats, Lynsey noticed, seemed to have decided cautiously to accept the big man-shaped dog, and were lolling across the veranda some distance from the artist, eyeing him inscrutably through slitted eyes.

Severus eyed him with a rather similar expression. "For somebody who presents such a - a harmless persona to the world, you have a remarkably dark vision, Lupin."

"I always was attracted to the night - and I suspect I would have been even if Fenrir Greyback hadn't decided that it would be funny to give me the disease to go with the name."

"I like them," Lynsey said. "Remus's paintings, I mean."

"They're competently executed, I'll admit, but - disturbing."

"I know - that's why I like them." Severus gave her an old-fashioned look and rolled his eyes in silent comment.

"The Wolfsbane is almost ready," he remarked with an air of rather forced casualness.

"Mm," Remus said, examining his own painting critically.

"You will be certain to take it, won't you?"

"I'm hardly going to forget, am I?"

"Oh no, it's not as if you'd _ever_ forgotten to take it before."

Remus gave him a sharp look. "That was - different."

"I reminded you that you hadn't taken it, and you still didn't take any steps to render yourself safe - with children there! If you had had the remotest sense of responsibility you would have _asked_ me to bind you!"

"Yes, well, it's - I did some asking around, later, and it seems that - well..."

"Almost as articulate as Potter!" the professor jibed.

"You leave Harry out of it," the other replied without much heat, "or I'll tell Dobby, and then where will you be? It's just - I hadn't realized before because always, before, either I'd taken a full course of Wolfsbane or I hadn't taken any, but it seems that - well, you know how when I'm on Wolfsbane, the pull of the moon on me is weakened, so that I don't transform until the moonlight actually touches me?"

"Yes."

"Well, it seems that if I miss the final dose, I still don't actually transform physically until the moon catches me, but the transformation starts to pull at my mind as soon as the moon is up, even if it's behind cloud, and it - the monster in me, it's like a separate, living thing, it _wants_ to be born and it - it affects my mind, it makes me keep forgetting to try to prevent it."

"God." The professor stared at him, his long nostrils flaring in alarm. "That's hardly reassuring; it makes it even more imperative that I make sure you bloody-well drink the bloody stuff."

"The circumstances were most unusual that night, though, and I was very - distracted."

"Unusual circumstances happen nine times out of bloody ten, in my experience. God." He looked down at his hands, twisting whitely together in the act of cracking a hazel-nut. Looked up again. "Will you tell me," he said, "what happened that night? Both before and after I... I've never really known."

"Yes; I suppose that you - well, missed quite a lot of it."

"Thanks to you bastards throwing me headfirst into a wall, you mean! I understand now that you - that you did have to protect Black, but wouldn't it have been enough just to bloody disarm me, not half bloody-well _kill_ me?"

"Oh but - see, that's one of the things - I suppose the blow will have made you forget it. We did try to disarm you, but, uh, more than one person fired at once - "

"Spare me the attempt to take the blame on yourself. You were bound and Black was unarmed, I haven't forgotten that much. You mean two of the children fired on me."

"All three of them, actually. But not - it was just Expelliarmus, you understand, but because all three of them fired at once it - reacted rather more strongly than any of us had expected."

"Ah. I - yes, I do see. Very well."

"I - the first thing was that I was looking at the Map when I saw Ronald Weasley approach the Willow, and I saw that Peter Pettigrew was with him. Then I saw Sirius dragging Ron and Peter down the passage to the Shrieking Shack, and I - my first thought when I saw Sirius's name was the same as yours, that he was a murderer who had come to kill the children, but seeing Peter's name I thought - I didn't know what to think. I was so confused I - I forgot that you would be coming soon with the Wolfsbane, and I just - ran."

"Very well. Go on."

"When I reached the Shack Sirius, he - he was quite calm, he still looked like my friend, not like a, a monster at all and it made me stop and think - think that maybe we'd all been wrong all those years, that maybe it was Peter who... The children thought that I'd betrayed them, but Sirius and I explained to them that Peter was a rat Animagus and that we thought he was the rat which Ron was carrying..."

"Information which I missed, and which nobody bothered to explain to me," Severus said dryly.

"How much did you hear?"

"I heard you telling them all about how your little _friends_ became Animagi and abetted you in ignoring Dumbledore's security precautions and endangering half the local countryside, but nothing to say what kinds of animal they were, only that - " He frowned and rubbed his fingers across his lips, remembering. "That Black and Potter were large animals, and Pettigrew was small. I suppose if I - if I had been in a calmer frame of mind I might have associated that with Black burbling on about a rat, later, but I was - you understand, being in that place, the place where I had nearly been murdered, confronting the two people who had nearly murdered me, expecting - more than half expecting to find the children already dead, _knowing_ that you were on the verge of a full unmodified transformation and believing that Black was - what Pettigrew turned out to be, I was - not in an especially rational frame of mind."

"You were frothing like a mad dog: but under the circumstances you were probably doing well not to have wet yourself - and I know you didn't, because if you had I would have smelled it."

"Huh. I'd have been a lot more bloody - rational if I hadn't just had to stand there listening to Black boasting about how he nearly fucking _killed_ me and saying that I had deserved it, and you bloody-well lying to Potter and telling him that the reason I hated his father was because I was fucking _jealous_ of him."

"Yeah, well, Sirius was in a... fragile frame of mind, I couldn't very well say that he and James bullied you ragged, could I, and I didn't know that you were listening."

"Even so - you could have found something to say that didn't involve accusing me of being _jealous_ of that, that empty-headed, arrogant prick who kept what few brain-cells he possessed below his belt and thought that Good Hair and the ability to play with his balls was a substitute for developing an actual personality..."

"Hah, yes, I remember you actually told him that in public once."

"I did, didn't I?"

"You always did have an... interesting turn of phrase. That was part of why they - we - hated you, of course. But even so - I know that you had good reason to bind me, it was sensible considering that I was about to transform, and if I hadn't already been sliding towards the were-madness I would have known that at the time. But to threaten Sirius - and me, incidentally, but that doesn't really concern me - to threaten Sirius with being Kissed, after all that he had suffered, that was - unconscionably cruel."

"I have - regretted it since," Severus said remotely, "but I hadn't really... my intention initially was to hand you both over to the Aurors, I hadn't really intended either of you to be Kissed, or at least - it was to my advantage that Black should be, I thought, because I thought that he - that he was - Riddle's - right-hand man, and so it was to my advantage that he should be silenced before he could tell any of the surviving Death Eaters that I had thwarted his attempt to kill Potter.

"Even so - I hadn't had time to think it through, but I wasn't really intending either of you to be Kissed, initially. It was only when... when you called me a fool and Potter called me pathetic for _minding_ hearing Black boasting about how he had nearly killed me - and for what? - just for bloody existing, that's what - and then Black himself saying that the joke was on me _again_ - and I just - saw red."

"Would it have made a difference if we had been more - placatory?"

"Oh yes. I think so."

"Maybe," Remus said, sounding depressed. "If we had been, then perhaps all the rest of it - Peter's escape, He Who's return... but we were all in a, an excitable frame of mind and I was - not myself. Or at least, I was halfway to being my _other_ self."

"So what happened after - after Potter and his darling friends threw me into a wall and brained me? Did anybody even bother to check that I was OK?"

"I - Hermione asked me to, and you didn't seem too bad, apart from still being unconscious."

"'Still'? How long was it after I was knocked out before you bothered to check?"

"Um - about quarter of an hour. But there wasn't - there wasn't very much we could do anyway. If you'd been, um, seriously hurt."

"Black could have slunk off into the woods with his tail between his legs and you could have sent Potter or Granger to fetch Poppy. You could at least have checked my vital signs and put me in the bloody Recovery Position, but I take it you didn't even bloody do that?"

"Um, no, but you - I was feeling more and more - less and less human, and Sirius and Harry just wanted to talk about Peter."

"And that was more important to all of you than whether I lived or died."

"I'm sorry. Then we forced Peter to transform - as much to convince Harry as anything - and then Sirius and I were going to kill him, but Harry stopped us which - which was unwise, as it turned out."

"And had Pettigrew actually confessed, at the point at which you decided to kill him?"

"Um - no. But he did later."

"Marvellous. So for all you knew, Black could have been lying to you, and Pettigrew - nasty creature though he is, and why he ever turned into a rat I don't know, they're quite nice little beasts - Pettigrew could still have been innocent, and Black could still have been the murderer. The only thing that had changed was the knowledge that Pettigrew had survived the original blast, and on that basis you were willing to execute him without trial."

"Well I - I could smell that Sirius was sincere and Peter was nervous..."

"Of course he was bloody nervous, you were going to bloody well kill him!"

"Yes but - he _was_ guilty."

"Yes - but so far as I can see you didn't know that when you decided to kill him: you just assumed. Then what?"

"We - after Harry persuaded us not to kill Peter, we decided to bring him to the castle for questioning. Ron and I were handcuffed to Peter on either side, Hermione followed us, then you, Sirius and Harry. Sirius was supposed to steer you through the tunnel but as I found out later he - he wasn't very careful."

"You mean he brutalized an unarmed, unconscious prisoner."

"I'm not sure how much was deliberate and how much was just - he hadn't used a wand for twelve years, after all. But certainly he - he didn't care much."

"Did any of you?"

"I think - it was such a narrow tunnel, only Sirius himself and Harry could see what was happening to you. And then - well, you know the rest, I think. When we emerged from the tunnel I transformed into a full were. Sirius headed me off to protect the children, but in the confusion Peter turned to a rat and escaped, and Ronald was knocked out. Sirius went after him as Padfoot and was caught by the Dementors, Harry and Hermione went after Sirius to rescue him and Harry somehow managed to summon James's Animagus form as his Patronus - or at least, future-Harry did - "

"I was spitting tacks when Dumbledore - " He stopped abruptly, and Lynsey saw grief settle over his face like a second skin. After a moment he went on, more quietly. "...when Dumbledore hinted to me that he'd had a hand in Black's escape, and that he'd connived in the illegal use of a Time-Turner. I was - concussed, furious, almost bloody delirious but I still recognized a high-sign when he gave it me, and swallowed my temper till later."

"I'll bet you let him have it with both barrels once Fudge was out of the way, though."

"Oh yes."

Both men sat quietly for a while, staring out across the darkening lawn, united in loss.

"There's something that's been puzzling me," Lynsey said eventually, into the silence. "If you don't transform until the moonlight touches you, when you're on Wolfsbane, why do you need to transform at all? I mean, the wolf - he's nice, you have lovely thick fur and everything, but why not just stay in a shuttered room and stay human?"

Remus sighed and leaned back in his chair. "It's perfectly possible to do that," he said seriously, "but if I do - well, the wolf, he takes his revenge. If I miss a transformation, the next one will be much worse. Painful, you understand. If I miss two in succession - not even Wolfsbane will prevent me from turning into the full monster at the third moon, whether the moonlight touches me or no."

He swirled the red liquor in his glass and held it up to the rising moon in ironic salute. "To the bitch who rules this poor tattered dog!"

Lynsey clinked her glass with his and murmured "To the Lady of the Moon", and after a moment Severus followed suit and muttered "Our Lady" under his breath. They drank together in silent unease.

"This really is remarkably good port," Remus said, sniffing at his glass with luxurious enjoyment. "The old rogue has done us proud - I wonder why?"

"Horace feels he has a guilt to expiate," Severus said dryly, "concerning... a failure to look closely enough at dear Lucius's extracurricular activities. When we were - boys."

"Ah." Remus swirled the red liquid in his glass, meditatively.

"I told him not to feel too badly about having been conned by such a consummate shyster, and that he has, in my opinion, more than expiated his guilt by his contribution to getting me out of Azkaban."

"That was - surprisingly kind and even forgiving of you," Remus murmured. "It really was that bad - Azkaban I mean - even without the Dementors?"

"Just - talking, like this - " Severus replied, his voice suddenly gone husky. He turned his head and Lynsey saw his eyes flash in the half-light, dark and bright. "It was so - having the guards sit with me, watching me, all the time, in case I did wandless magic and yet never looking me in the face, never meeting my eyes, it was - I could listen to them talk to each other, about their work, about their lives, it gave me something to fix on, but it was - it was worse, hearing them talk across me as if I wasn't there, knowing that for them I _wasn't_ there, that if I spoke to them they wouldn't hear me, that I was on the other side of the glass forever and I couldn't make them hear me or even look at me, I was a shadow, voiceless, shut out in the dark, for_ever_ - "

Remus's teeth gleamed in something that was probably meant to be a smile. "Being a werewolf means being excluded too: the difference is, I _am_ the darkness into which they shut me out."

The professor made a little huffing noise and flicked a nutshell out into the gathering night. "Are you actively trying to give me the creeps, or is that just a happy accident?"

"Ah, you know me, Severus."

The other man turned and looked at him, frowning, and his mouth tightened and turned down at the corners. "I really think that I don't. Or that nobody does, possibly."

"Not even Tonks?" Remus said flippantly.

"I wouldn't presume to speculate on what Nymphadora does or doesn't know."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Look at me, Severus, do," the little man said, as commandingly as his rather piping voice would allow, and Lynsey's professor stopped his neurotic pacing and visibly forced himself to meet the old man's eye, insofar as that was possible with both of them standing, although the look of shame on his face still made Lynsey's stomach crawl.

"I don't know how you can bear to," he muttered, and swallowed convulsively, his skin blanching to the colour of milk.

"What you showed me is - ghastly, of course," the older man said gently, "but I've seen nothing to change my view of you. And before you say it," he added, as Severus opened his mouth to comment, "my opinion of you is high. Very high."

The younger man turned away, squeezing his eyes and his fists tightly shut. "Even after watching me - spilling my secrets, spilling _piss_ and - and the rest of it; totally stripped of all fucking - pride - ?" he said jerkily.

Filius made a "Pshaw!" noise which Lynsey privately thought might have been the height of teenage cool in about 1820. He was possibly old enough for it to have been original. "I've never been one to stand on dignity - too busy standing on a pile of books just to see over my own damned desk." He trotted across the carpet with neat little steps like a Shetland pony's, until he could reach up and give his colleague's elbow a careful pat

"It's not as bad as it could have been, my boy," he said seriously, his squeaky voice grave with concern. "You didn't - you never volunteered any information they hadn't specifically asked for, and they didn't... none of them knew all the right questions to ask, Merlin be thanked. It's not good, but it could have been a great deal worse."

Severus looked down at him, frowning. "I thought that I - that I did volunteer information. After they..." He swallowed convulsively again, and Lynsey could see the sweet breaking out on his skin.

"Yes, but - only on subjects which they'd already been asking about. There are whole areas which - you told them at length about Order headquarters at Grimmauld Place, for example, as far as you could do so without being the Secret-Keeper, but they didn't think to ask you about other meeting-places such as this one, or they hadn't got round to it yet, and you never offered to tell them."

The younger man drew a deep, shaky breath. "It seems my - my training held, then. Thank God for conditioned reflexes."

"Under the circumstances - you did very well."

"Don't give me credit I don't deserve, old man," the professor said harshly. "I spent years conditioning myself not to give _Him_ any more information than I could help, until it became automatic. If I - if I hadn't been too dazed even to think of it, I would have told Him any bloody thing I could think of to stop the pain, by the end."

"I would have traded him any information he asked for, to get you out, if I could have done. But there was no trade on offer."

"Even when you all thought that I - that I had murdered Dumbledore?"

"Even so. I've known you since you were a child, Severus, I couldn't - " He sniffled audibly, his eyes filling with tears, and the object of his concern made an exasperated noise.

"Sit down, Filius, do. Here." He fished a clean handkerchief out of a pocket in his robes, and handed it over. "Do you want a peppermint, like one of my soggy little homesick first years?"

The little man hopped up to perch on the edge of the couch, his feet swinging in mid-air, and blew his nose loudly. "I never liked James and Sirius" he said inconsequentially. "Can't say that to Minerva, of course, but they were nasty, nasty boys, always picking on my Ravenclaws." He blew again, honking. "I give mine chocolate frogs."

"Not 'grown up' enough for most of mine - they're snobby little brutes, most of them. They'd rather have a Mint Imperial and feel sophisticated, even if they don't really like it as much. And hard mints don't bloody melt in your pocket and get all over your robes."

"Ah, well, mine are all collecting the cards, you see..."

"You astonish me."

"If it's not one fad with them, it's another - do you want the hanky back?"

"No, no - you keep it. Really."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"So you, um, now you have to put these memories back into your head, and that means pretty-much re-living them as you do so?"

"I already told you. Yes."

"Do you _have_ to?"

Severus sighed irritably, pushing his hair back from his face with both hands and then pressing the heels of his hands against his temples. "It would be possible, and in some ways preferable, not to, but in the long term it's - not healthy just to tear pieces out of your own mind and leave them out, and the longer you wait before re-inserting them, the worse it gets. And besides - " He spun away from her in a swirl of black robes and began to pace restlessly. "The whole _point_, I told you, stupid, stupid, the whole point was to have a second viewpoint, so that Filius and I could go over and over and fucking over the whole sorry bloody mess together. If I can't even remember it properly myself, that means I can't talk it through and that means somebody else has got to view it and I can't, I can't bear it - "

Lynsey made to intercept him, to steady him, making cautious soothing noises until he at least stopped pacing to look at her. "If there's anything - anything that I can do to help..."

"There's nothing that you can do to make it any easier." He turned his back on her, hunching his shoulders, and Lynsey thought she heard the silky voice murmur: "Even if I bloody _deserved_ to have it any easier."

"I can be with you. For whatever that may be worth."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The stone basin with its curling symbols looked like something out of the deep time of Celtic folklore - a great or lesser hallow which might have sat on a pillar in Glass Castle, to ensorcel the unwary. She was tempted to touch it, to run her fingers over the swirling unknown words, but she knew better than to interfere with a magical object whose properties were obscure to her. When she looked at it, it seemed to contain, impossibly, a reflection of the sky: silver-edged clouds drifting across the dingy Tupperware-coloured firmament of a British spring morning.

She turned to glance at Severus, and saw him give her a look of wall-eyed apprehension and swallow once, before stepping firmly up to the table on which the bowl sat. He took out his wand - _her_ wand, the wand she had made for him, all creamy-white and silver - tapped it briskly on the rim of the bowl and then drew the tip of it lightly across the surface of that upside-down sky.

A rope of glimmering mist came away from the stuff in the bowl, like a controlled flurry of cohesive frost, and adhered to the tip of the wand. The professor touched the sycamore lightly to his temple, transferring the clinging, glittering stuff, which began to sink into his skin. "Ectoplasm," Lynsey thought wildly, feeling slightly hysterical - "_real_ ectoplasm, none of your Victorian butter-muslin rubbish" - but all trace of hilarity left her as she saw the professor flinch slightly as if he had been struck, his hands grabbing for the edge of the table to steady himself, and a brief flare of horrible vision burned itself across her consciousness: himself held fast in magical bonds, jerking and jolting in agony, sobbing for a chance to spill his secrets as a short, burly man with a moustache and a butcher's apron did something indistinct to an arm which looked impossibly distorted and wrong - even more so than could be accounted for by the splinters of white bone tearing out through the skin and the dark blood which turned both torturer and tortured to gory spectres - a vision of Hell recast as an abattoir -

Again, and again - eight strands, ten, twenty - as many units of memory as there had been questionings, during seventeen days of torture, and each time Lynsey saw a flash of what was passing across her friend's mind. In some, the early ones she supposed, he was still resolutely refusing to talk, his bitten lips clamped tightly shut even as his body arched and convulsed, although it was still important to know what the Dark One and his minions had been trying for; in others he remembered himself utterly abased, mindless and howling and babbling information through a jagged succession of torments - a few mortifyingly sexual, most simply brutal or bizarre, and she half thought that she should block the images if she could, to save his privacy, and half felt that it would be important, somewhere, somewhen, to have seen and not turned away. It was a measure, she thought, of how shattered he was that he was letting his mind spill over like this, but she dared not speak to him, to disrupt a process which he was obviously finding quite hard enough as it was; and so she could do nothing but bite her own lip and wince her way through a slide-show of horrors.

When the last skein of electric, sparkling silver candyfloss had sunk through his sweating skin and the bowl was finally empty, her professor turned and walked blindly towards the window, finding it by the simple expedient of crashing into the sill. Lynsey hovered at his side, feeling useless, as he leaned his palms against the glass, staring out at the bright and clouded sky. When he began to shake, she put her hand on his arm, gently, covering the place where the Dark Mark had been.

The shaking got worse and she saw him close his eyes as if in pain, the bitter lines of his face tightening into a terrible mask as he swallowed and swallowed again to keep himself from throwing up. Abruptly, he made a sharp, harsh sound and turned towards her. Lynsey wasn't sure if he was planning to embrace her or strike at her to drive her away, but without thought or hesitation she stepped forward inside his reach and slipped her arms round him, drawing him close.

His narrow back stiffened under her hands and for an endless, awful second she thought that she had made the wrong move, perhaps mortally offended him: but then his arms clutched at her, desperately, and she felt him sag forwards, almost fainting, and his head dropped down to rest on her shoulder.

Lynsey wrapped her own arms firmly around the professor's sharp ribs, leaned her head against his, and murmured "Sshh, now, good lad." Blinking away tears, she felt him slowly relax against her, until she could feel his heart racing and stumbling against hers and there was no barrier between them at all.

"I'm sorry," he muttered quietly against her shoulder, and she hugged him closer.

"You've no need to be," she murmured back, giving his ribs a gentle squeeze. "There's nothing in this that you should blame yourself for, you loony. Nothing at all."

* * *

**Author's note:**

I couldn't resist doing a partial re-run of the same conversation Snape has with Hermione in _Lost and Found_, where he says to her that if anyone were to take a sexual interest in him he doesn't know if he'd behave like a robotic whore or a scared cat, in order to show how different Lynsey's approach is from Hermione's.

Marmaduke Scarlet appears in _The Little White Horse_ by Elizabeth Goudge: which apparently was JK Rowling's favourite childhood book.

Thanks to Countrymouse and Ramos for the "Install wizard" gag - I wish I could say I thought of it myself, but I didn't.

During the Shrieking Shack incident in PoA Snape initially says, referring to Sirius and Remus, "Two more for Azkaban tonight". At that point, he is slightly out of breath and is gloating a bit, but perfectly rational. It's only after Sirius snarls "The joke's on you again, Severus" that Snape starts ranting about summoning the Dementors and having either of them Kissed.

I'm not sure whether JK Rowling herself is aware of this, but Snape's injuries sustained during the Shrieking Shack incident would, in the real world, be considered very severe, and would require an urgent X-ray and an overnight stay in hospital at the very least. He was hit on the head and was bleeding from the scalp, with his head at a funny angle which could have indicated a broken neck. Any period of unconsciousness resulting from a blow and lasting more than ten minutes is considered potentially life-threatening and can result in death or permanent brain-damage: Snape was unconscious for around fifty minutes. Allowing a patient's head to suffer even a slight knock shortly after an initial blow, as Sirius did when he scraped Snape's head against the ceiling, risks triggering Second Impact Syndrome, which can kill in seconds. And Snape's wild, literally spitting rage later that evening is a typical symptom of severe concussion.

There have been minor edits to this chapter, mainly to take account of the fact that Remus was very small when he was transformed and therefore probably wouldn't remember having already been attracted by the night, and to show Lynsey being plagued by memory.


	14. 13 Medicine Songs

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**13: MEDICINE SONGS**  
((_In which music soothes the savaged breast._))

She was afraid that he would be so unnerved at having unbent to her that he would draw back further, in a little two-steps-forwards-and-one-back waltz of neurosis - but he confounded her expectations by actually becoming more relaxed around her, in an exhausted, slumped sort of a way. Filius Flitwick had written down all the questions which the younger man's torturers had demanded of him, and the answers which he had given them, so that he and Severus could discuss them as neutrally as possible - mere words on parchment. Even so, Severus was grey in the face after every session and Filius guided him to meals, and to his room, like a tugboat buzzing anxiously around a liner which was barely making it into port.

Lynsey for her part felt deeply shaken. Seeing that jagged assortment of images from his torture had left her infested with sorrow and possessed by a furious, restless tenderness she could hardly act on without offending him; and often now she found herself flinching and jerking her head aside in an effort to shake off the naked, bloody ghost of himself which her mind's eye could see smeared across his real-time presence.

His dreams were bad - not surprizing, under the circumstances - and Minerva had been right to make them share a room, Lynsey thought. At least this way, she could watch over Severus in the night without annoying him by appearing to hover. Often, she found, she could head the nightmare off at the pass without even waking him, just by holding his hand and talking to him softly, or singing under her breath: although most of the songs she knew were hardly suitable for a lullaby, and she found herself resorting to the slow, sad music which had been current when they were children - Sally Free and Easy again, with her honeycomb heart, and the dreaming song of departure which had haunted her own formative years:

"If you miss the train I'm on  
Then you'll know that I am gone,  
Gone five hundred miles away from home.

Lord I'm one,  
Lord I'm two,  
Lord I'm three,  
Lord I'm four,  
Lord I'm five hundred miles away from home."

Ballads of loss and exile were more likely to comfort him than anything too overtly cheerful, she thought, although the old song about San Francisco had that same gentle, mournful flow to it that seemed to soothe him, even though it was really a happy piece. Or perhaps not. All that na?e, hopeful dream of the Summer of Love had shredded away on a cold wind, after all, and there was as much sorrow and sweetness in it as in any of the others, although she slid past some of the lyrics, blurring them into an embarrassed mumble. It was simply impossible to picture Severus with flowers in his hair - unless perhaps it was some sinister, pale lily which attracted moths.

But as she stared at his white, strained face and tried to sing his terrified shivering and flinching back down to something resembling normal sleep, the song which kept trying to sing itself in her head was one she hardly wished to be reminded of, at this juncture -

"Broken-hearted I remember,  
Broken-hearted I remain:  
He is my bonny Light Horseman;  
In the wars he was slain."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The last afternoon before they were due to leave, Remus Lupin walked Severus back to his room and invited himself in for a coffee. They were talking together animatedly about some sort of dispute which had taken place during the meeting, and as he pushed the door to after him Lynsey heard Severus snap "I don't care if he _is_ Dumbledore's friend and one of the founder members of the Order et-bloody-cetera, the bloody bastard is asking for it, and if he isn't careful he's going to get it."

"Actually hexing him in the middle of a meeting would be going a bit far, though," Remus said, in his irritatingly calm voice. He sat down and helped himself to a sugared biscuit. "Why are you so - I know he doesn't really trust you, but neither does Sturgis and he doesn't seem to bother you half as much. What makes Alastor so special?"

Severus, still standing, brought his hands together in front of his chest, jerkily, and the muscles in his jaw tightened like iron. "When I was - before, when the, the Ministry examined me, before Dumbledore convinced them to let me go, when I was - interrogated, he - "

"Alastor actually tortured you?" Remus said sharply, the biscuit poised forgotten halfway to his mouth.

"Not - not as such, he - he just came to question me. After I had been suitably - 'softened up' by his colleagues. But I was - lying on the ground, coughing up blood, and he stepped back away from me with this little sneer on his face and twitched the hem of his robe away, as if I was - like I was dirty. Contaminated." He pushed his hair back from his face with the heels of both hands and pressed them briefly to his temples. "Of course, I was dirty - by that point."

"Oh." A little V of frown-line had appeared between Remus's pale-brown eyebrows. "In that case, I take it back about hexing him - but you still probably shouldn't do it where the others can see." The corners of his lips twitched slightly. "That explains why you pulled rank on him so hard you made his head spin in time with the eye."

The professor flashed him a sudden, tired grin. "I did, didn't I?" He folded down gracefully onto the sofa in a flurry of dark robes. "And bless Minerva for backing me up." Lynsey brought him a hot mug of treacly coffee, and he wrapped his long, white hands around it, feeling the warmth. She herself felt rather too warm, at once hot and chilled. Two wakeful nights spent watching over his troubled rest and the strain of having witnessed those nightmarish vignettes had left her feeling feverish and strange.

"So did youse lot actually reach any useful conclusions, after all that - or shouldn't I ask?"

The two men looked at each other in wary collusion, and for a moment she felt that she indeed should not have asked: but then the professor shrugged wearily. "I don't see why not. The information is... if it came to Riddle's ear, that might actually be more helpful than not."

"It's about the - the Horcruxes" Remus said, in his soft voice. "Because of the, um, information He-Who managed to extract from Severus" - he shot the other man an apologetic look, and got a snarl for his trouble - "he knows that we know about them, and we're afraid he may make more, to replace the ones we've already destroyed."

"Yes - Severus and Harry told me about it."

"Right. Well, the thing is - the Ministry has ways of tracking certain spells - unauthorized Portkeys, underage magic..."

She was right up there with him. "You think the Ministry could spot it if he makes another Horcrux?"

"That is the idea, yes," the professor interjected smoothly. "Unfortunately we need, in the first instance, access to the Ministry's spell-detection instruments, to which we have no legal right, and in the second instance, an accurate idea of the Horcrux spell, of which we have no bloody knowledge except - except for the little that's in my memory."

Lynsey made an interrogative noise, and he gave her a bleak look, the lines of his face as harsh as if they had been cut there with an axe. "I was there, the night He - He murdered the Potters. I - I had hoped to persuade Him to spare Lily at least, perhaps James as well, even though He was Hell-bent on killing the child. I told - told Him I wanted Lily to - amuse myself with." He grimaced, and Remus winced. "Once again, my own bloody so-called cleverness backfired on me and He decided to take me with Him, I couldn't get clear of Him to send an alert. Pettigrew was there too I think but I didn't realize - I saw a rat, watching us, but I never knew - and then James came boiling out like the bloody feckless idiot he was and - Riddle - killed him before I had any chance to act. If I could have."

"You couldn't have - killed Riddle?" Remus asked quietly. "Even temporarily?"

Severus shook his head. "He was so shielded against magical attack - I suppose I could have hit Him with a coal-scuttle or something but if I'd failed He'd have known I'd betrayed Him and then I - I would have lost the only chance I had to save her." He drew a deep breath. "In any case I - I was not the Secret Keeper, nor had I been admitted by the Secret Keeper. My - so-called bloody 'Lord' knew the secret and took me in at His back but I - it was like walking into your own blind-spot. I could see Lily - "

He stopped and shut his eyes for a moment, not looking at Remus. "I could see Lily," he went on in a low voice, "I could hardly see anything else but I could see her, that hair, burning like a bloody meteor - she knew me, she must have thought - thought I'd come to see her die and she wouldn't take His offer, she wouldn't get out of the way and I - I could barely see, it was all shadows and shapes and He - He killed her. In front of me. He had His back to me, I tried to send a Patronus to summon the Order but I couldn't - couldn't remember anything happy and then He fired on the child and it all went dark. When I came to it was all - rubble, I could hear the child crying but I couldn't see it properly, there were beams and bricks and I still couldn't - see. The Fidelius, you understand - it protected the knowledge that the Potters lived at that address. I couldn't see the child to find it and I was - I had three broken ribs and a smashed shoulder where the flying masonry had caught me in the chest, I was good for damn-all anyway, so I used what strength I had left to Apparate to the Hog's Head and Aberforth alerted Albus."

"Aberforth was - is Albus Dumbledore's brother," Remus Lupin said, and Lynsey nodded. "And Dumbledore sent Hagrid. The Fidelius had been set up from the outset to allow Hagrid access: we always knew that the Order might need to reach James and Lily in an emergency and Hagrid being a half-giant - well, he was the one Order member we knew was definitely immune to the Imperius. He was able to dig Harry out without using magic in front of Muggle bystanders, although Merlin knows what they made of him otherwise."

"I would have got the bloody brat out if I could," Severus said painfully, and Remus inclined his head in acknowledgement. "But in any case, I saw - so far as I could tell _He_ performed no complex spell after He had killed Lily and before attacking - Harry, except that He - " He mimed holding his wand, which was in fact thrust through his belt, and made a quick gesture as of someone untying something, releasing it. "I find it hard to believe the Horcrux process would be so - nearly instantaneous: the very little I have ever heard about it suggests a complex operation. But He had been closeted on His own for over an hour before He singled me out and told me to accompany Him, and He looked strange - more strange than usual, I mean. From which I surmise that the main part of the spell was performed in advance, and that He needed only to complete some final activation before attempting to murder the child."

"Yes." She was feeling her way through it - but Horcruxes were such obscure magic that the territory was hardly less familiar to her than it was to them. "If it was already - already activated, and all it required then to feed it was a death, you'd have thought the deaths of the father or mother would have already completed the circuit. Either he did something after killing Lily" - both men winced visibly - "and before trying to kill Harry, to prime the process ready to receive Harry's death, or there was something special about the actual way he was planning to kill him."

"As far as I or all of Dumbledore's thaumaturgical instrumentation could tell, it was a simple Killing Curse. Certainly it was green - as green as her eyes," he added, his mouth twisting bitterly.

"Either way, it seems clear you've got a two-step process you've got to detect."

Remus nodded and took a crunching bite of biscuit. "Yes - but it would be sufficient, for our purposes, to detect the first, main spell. At least - "

"Detecting the final stage would give us His actual location at the moment of the kill, and that of His victim," Severus said dourly, "but unless we could scramble to get there in seconds, He would probably still be Apparated and gone before we could catch Him, complete with another bloody Horcrux, and the victim would still be just as bloody dead." He rubbed tiredly at his temples. "We are still undecided whether to simply let the - Him - know that we will know if He creates another Horcrux, in the hopes that this will put Him off from doing so - or keep it dark and see if we can catch Him either during the preliminary process or in the actual act, since He is the only wizard in Britain likely to be using that particular spell - at the risk of His creating another Horcrux, and another corpse, if we fail."

"Either way, it's a bit academic at the moment", Remus said, helping himself to another biscuit. "We're first going to have to get access to the Ministry's surveillance instruments in London _and_ break into the base they've set up at Hogwarts, in order to find the Headmaster's private stash of grimoires."

" Dumbledore," Severus said, gazing glumly into his coffee, "hid some of the more... exciting works away, not wishing to destroy knowledge but believing that nobody in the school but himself had the moral and magical strength to resist the temptations of what was written there. Which, arguably, might have been true, considering that some of those bloody books are sentient and liable to read you back - but right now it's a pain in the arse."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

That night when she woke him up whimpering from memory's clammy embrace, and saw the tears running down his cheeks as silver as moonlight, he stared at her in the darkness and muttered: "Lily - Lily begged Him for mercy, did I say that? I keep hearing her beg Him for mercy - but I could have told her it was a fucking waste of time."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The following morning, after breakfast, they took their leave. Lynsey felt queasy and tense without knowing why, and picked at her food even worse than Severus usually did. She was sorry to see the back of most of them, and touched that so many of them - not just Remus, Minerva, Poppy and Filius, which was expected, but Neville, Hagrid, Arthur and Molly, Hermione and even Harry - came to take a special leave of her professor, speaking to him with a concern and kindness which made him bristle like a wet porcupine. Of Horace Slughorn there was no sign - he having returned to his own mysterious purposes.

Harry and Remus in any case came with them as far as the stair door, carrying the cats and the generator - since Severus had his work cut out with the laptop and Lynsey. He spun her around like a dancer and she reeled in with him and round and through blackness and constriction and dizzying speed and out again, into the area at the front of the flat. It was all she could do not to puke on the pavement as Tonks, who had been watching the house, gave them the all-clear. Today, Tonks was going for retro-Punk, with chains.

As much as she had enjoyed her part of their week-long expedition (aside from fretting about the strain it was putting on the professor), Lynsey was as glad as the cats to be back on home ground, though she still felt oddly out of sorts. By evening, it was clear that she was actively ill.

As she came out from the bathroom, fresh (or not) from throwing up, it felt as if a solid wall of heat crashed down on her without warning and she staggered, and met the professor darting forwards to catch her in a billow of black. He grabbed her by the elbows, holding her up as if she weighed almost nothing, and steered her firmly to the settee. "Uurrgh," she said, articulately, and began to slide sideways onto the sofa's padded arm but her friend's arm was there already, holding her up. As a wave of dizziness crashed over her and the room and her stomach surged like a boat on rough water, she felt his cool hand insinuate itself against her forehead.

She forced herself to focus, and found him staring at her at such close quarters that the dagger-like tip of his nose made her go nearly cross-eyed. "Damn," he said, in a precise voice; "you're burning up."

"Not - no's hot's you were," she said fuzzily, remembering their flight through the snow, a little over three months ago. "'S'not - not pneumonia. Jus' 'flu'."

"You're going to bed," the professor replied firmly, and she let herself be drawn to her feet and half steered, half carried to the bedroom. He helped her to undress with a brisk, businesslike despatch (though she saw a tinge of pink colouring his sharp cheekbones), and then commanded her firmly to lie down. She more than half expected him to offer her a peppermint.

When he had tucked her in she lay on her back and held on to the sides of the mattress, which seemed to be tipping and rolling slightly. He stood staring down at her, looking slightly awkward now that he had come to the end of his flurry of efficiency. "There are potions for this," he said stiffly, "but I cannot brew them at present - I don't have the ingredients, and even if I did they take days to prepare."

"Which time, I'll probably be OK anyway. Tha's all right, pet."

He snorted at that. "Do you want me to send a message to Poppy and see if she can send you some ready-made-up Flew Away Mixture?"

"That'd mean sending a P'tronus or - or finding one of those... teleporting fires?"

"Yes - since I don't have an owl here."

"Better - better no'tract attention. 'S Lemsip - powder you take for 'flu' - in the kitchen."

He found it, for a wonder, and worked out how to make it up from the instructions on the packet, and when she had taken it she felt a little more clear-headed and less likely to drool. But it didn't do much for the nausea. Within half an hour she was kneeling on the tiled floor beside the lavatory again while Severus held her shoulders with that same detached efficiency. She asked him about it, between heaves, and he laughed under his breath and said that he had dealt with more than his fair share of teenage drunks. When she had brought up what felt like everything she had eaten for the last three days, she sat with her forehead pressed against the cool porcelain of the sink, fighting the urge to lie down on the bathroom floor, while Severus poured water for her into the tooth-mug. She didn't have the energy to explain about drinking and non-drinking water supplies, and in any case it hardly seemed worth worrying about when she already had a gastric bug.

And, yes, he gave her a peppermint to suck, saying that it would settle her stomach, although the corners of his mouth quirked in dry amusement as he said it.

Later she woke in near darkness to find him still by her bedside, tired but deft, passing his long hands back and forth over her chest and stomach in a complex pattern and singing under his breath an odd, summery buzz of a spell-song, both like and unlike the one which he had used to heal his own maimed feet on the far side of flight and terror.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the morning, she woke to find light filtering in through the curtains and the professor's slim hand sliding behind her shoulders. "Sit up, now, and drink this" his smooth voice said and she did so, taking the proffered glass without hesitation. Whatever-it-was was heavy on the ginger, and she could feel it coiling in her stomach, warming away the nausea.

"So trusting," he purred, and she blinked at him.

"Of course I trust you - why wouldn't I? I know you aren't out to hurt me, and I know you know what you're doing. What is it?"

"Just - something I made up. From what was in the kitchen." He sounded suddenly, oddly choked, and when she reached out to draw the back of her hand across the line of his unshaven jaw in drowsy tenderness, he barely flinched.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

As a nurse, his bedside manner was decidedly brusque and a little awkward, but he fetched and carried for her with a willingness which, in another man, she would almost have called cheerful; and in her current condition, if he was willing to wait on her hand and foot she was perfectly willing to let him. It occurred to her that he was pleased to feel that he was contributing to the household. He even went out alone to shop, and she sweated with worry for him until he got back, although she knew he had an Order bodyguard with him at all times.

And when he was not actively playing nursemaid, he brought the laptop into her room and worked at the side table, companionable and silent, and she lay and watched his eager, wiry poise as he tracked down some new fact or fallacy - his whole body tensed forwards like a coiled spring in sheer academic excitement, and his hawk face illuminated by the hard glare of the screen.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The following day, she was well enough to get up and eat a little light lunch (prepared by Severus), and then deal with her email. As she answered various friends' enquiries as to her health and whereabouts it occurred to her that if she didn't want to cause offence or arouse suspicion by suddenly refusing to receive visitors, she was either going to have to become a recluse or inform those of her friends who lived locally that she had acquired a bidey-in. Or a flatmate, at any rate, although she had high hopes of eventual bidey-in-ness.

Either way, she supposed that if she told them she had met Severus during the witch moot in London she would not, technically, be lying: and his Gothic appearance certainly fitted the part. She wondered if it would be safe to admit, even to a Muggle, that he was staying with her: but if she continued to keep herself so much to herself May, at least, was soon going to start asking questions - and not taking "Oh, you know..." as an answer.

Having not eaten for about forty hours, prior to lunch, she still felt a little grey around the edges - lightheaded and still rather hot, and definitely not up to serious work. Severus had an old Steeleye Span album playing in the background - leaning against the wall with his arms folded and his expression hooded and inward-looking, dreaming on the music, even though his mouth tightened perceptibly as Tim Hart's rough voice sang the fate of the shot gamekeeper:

"He on the ground lay crying,  
Just like some person dying,  
With no assistance nigh him..."

and Lynsey herself winced in sympathy. But for Severus, assistance had come, finally, and there had been an end to crying - or at least an intermission. Restless, she perched on the edge of the table near him, sharing the moment without speaking. Sharing the music.

"We rode on, and we sped on,  
Until we came to a bonny green hall..."

sang the voice in the speakers, as she almost reached out to him, and he almost reached out to her, and then it was Maddy Prior, singing as no one before, perhaps, had ever sung, nor ever would again, fierce and perfect and unique, the rhythm of it driving, bounding -

"I'm a hand weaver to me trade,  
I fell in love with a factory maid,  
And if I could but her favour win  
I'd stand beside her and weave by steam.

Me father to me scornful said,  
'How could you fancy a factory maid?'"

And her friend looked at her, suddenly, painfully, and opened his mouth - "I wish - "

"What do you wish?"

"'...If I could but enjoy my dear  
I'd stand in the factory all the day  
And she and I'd keep our shuttles in play.'"

"Oh God - I wish - "

"'I went to my love's bedroom door,  
Where often times I had been before,  
But I could not speak nor yet get in  
The pleasant bed that my love laid in.'

'How can you say it's a pleasant bed,  
When nowt lies there but a factory maid?'  
'And a factory maid although she be,  
Blessed is the man that enjoys she'..."

purred Prior's inimitable voice as Severus made a desperate gesture of invitation, of drawing in, and Lynsey stepped forwards into his arms and he seized her tight, breathless, shaking -

"Oh, pleasant thoughts come to me mind  
As I turned down her sheets so fine,  
And I seen her two breasts standing so,  
Like two white hills all covered with snow."

She slipped her arms round him and held him close, his head was on her shoulder, she could hear his ragged breath; as he clutched her hard against him she could feel him suddenly hard with desire through five combined layers of clothing - but as he felt her feeling it he flamed abruptly scarlet and shoved her violently away, stumbling back against the wall and hyperventilating in panic.

Lynsey caught herself against the table, almost falling, steadied herself and then stepped back further to give him space. "It's all right," she said quietly, remembering with an internal, sympathetic cringe that he had been conditioned to associate being seen to be aroused with being jeered at. "You just have to give yourself time, is all."

He nodded, jerkily. "I do want," he said unsteadily, "to be touched in a - a kind way. It's just - "

"Yes." Somewhere in the background, the song rattled towards a conclusion of grinding labour and weariness.

"Well, we've answered one question," Lynsey said wryly. "You're obviously not going to go all numbly submissive if I make a pass at you."

"Where are the girls, I will tell you plain:  
The girls have gone to weave by steam,  
And if you would find them you must rise at dawn  
And trudge to the mill in the early morn."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was the clawing vicarious panic which woke her, rather than anything more concrete - but she had learned to trust her instincts, especially where Severus was concerned, and she was already stumbling blearily towards his room before she was fully awake. As she pushed the door open she saw his head jerking from side to side and his hands clenching and unclenching spasmodically on the bedclothes. Even as she watched he arched his back, his whole body bowing upwards from the bed like a strychnine victim, threw his head back and opened his mouth to scream; but by then she had hold of him, shaking him, calling his name, and the scream cut off in a choked wail.

"Don't!" she said sharply: "you'll wake the neighbours." The mundanity of that cut through his panic like a knife, as she had known it would, and he collapsed back against the mattress in a tangle of limbs like a dropped puppet, gasping for breath and staring wildly at her as if she'd slapped him.

But he was still panicking - his chest was heaving raggedly even if he wasn't actually screaming, and hammering fear radiated off him in waves. He was too conscious to be soothed by being openly sung to - she knew without having to think about it that if she tried it with him in this raw a state, he would find it patronizing and irritating - but not quite conscious enough to be talked calm.

Not knowing what else to do she folded down onto the floor next to him and clasped his right hand in hers, so that their joined hands rested on his chest - close enough to an embrace to give support without making him feel restricted - and began almost silently to sing to herself, not to him. Snatches of song, wild, fierce, jumbled - pushing that hot misery back and back, out of her mind, out of his, raising power in herself, raising strength so that she could force his emotional state to conform to hers, using her link with him to steady him as she was steadying herself, until she could feel his heaving, labouring ribs beginning to settle. She looked at him then, and found him watching her with intelligent focus, although his eyes were still glittering and dilated.

When she was satisfied that his breathing was near-normal and he was no longer likely to panic himself into convulsions, she got up and padded across the bare boards to the kitchen to fetch him a glass of water, leaving the door open so that he could see what she was doing. When she came back with it he had managed to push himself up to a sitting position, huddled in a snarl of blankets. He accepted the glass without comment and tossed the contents back in one long swallow.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" She more than half expected him to say no, and would have accepted it if he had - but she still made the offer, so that he wouldn't feel he was imposing on her if he chose to speak.

"I was - dreaming about Christmas. Sleigh bells and plum puddings and all that - seasonal fucking cheer" he said, making an attempt at a self-mocking sneer as the sweat beaded on his skin.

"About _Christmas_?" He gazed at her down his long nose, his lips curling scornfully as her sleep-addled brain dragged itself into gear. "Oh - you mean _last_ Christmas, when they..."

He nodded curtly, trying to appear in control of himself although she could see a muscle jumping in his jaw. "Christmas was, was... so-called bloody Season of Goodwill but Macnair spent Christmas Eve flaying the skin off my feet over several excruciating fucking hours, and then on the day itself they used a Portkey to take me somewhere - it looked like the Riddle House - to be used as _entertainment_."

She put her hand up to her mouth. "Oh, gods, I can imagine - "

"_Can_ you? Do you really bloody think so?" He wrapped his arms round his knees and began to sway, muttering, fast and desperate. "Everybody amused themselves with me as they pleased, it was a fucking _feast_ and I was so thirsty, hungry, the smell of the food made me want to vomit but I had nothing left to vomit with and I could hardly even understand who was doing what - it was just a blur of pain and voices, jeering at me, baying - they set the unconsuming fire on me, Gubraithian fire, and made me burn like a bloody candle." Shivers chased themselves across his skin. "By the time Lucius cast the Racking Curse on me and then m-mounted me while my joints were tearing out of their sockets it was almost a fucking relief, it hurt less than the burning, but then when he was finished Bellatrix made some crude remark and she pushed the, the tip of a wand, my bloody wand, _inside_ me and cast Cruciatus I couldn't believe how painful - "

Lynsey made a sick noise in her throat and he stared at her blindly, his teeth chattering with fright, rocking back and forth on the bed like a madman as he tried to distract himself from the memory of pain. "_Crucio_ - _Crucio_ is always supposed to be the worst agony you can have, I thought I knew what _Crucio_ felt like - thought I was a fucking expert - but this was s-so much more; and again, again, I thought my bones were going to shatter like glass and she kept on and on until they did, they did break, until the convulsions started to snap my bones - and then He healed the breaks and my, my joints so that He could send me back to the white room and start again - hanging me up by my wrists the way you found me and letting my own weight rip my shoulders out of their sockets all over again. All alone. He said, said, in that horrible whistle of a voice, 'My poor Severus, do the crowds disturb you?' and hung me up to suffer all alone, nothing but white light and pain and freezing cold, and never any rest from it."

"From a purely practical viewpoint," Lynsey muttered, trying in her turn to distract herself from her own choking queasiness, "one can only say thank the gods you _were_ alone. I really doubt that I could have taken down more than maybe one of the bastards. Crabbe, maybe - he didn't strike me as entirely bright, so if one was going to have to bash his brains out with a rock you were already halfway there."

Severus made a choking laugh which tried to turn into a sob, but the pleasure of shared bitchiness was enough to interrupt his frantic swaying. "He's thicker than a yard of lard, always has been. But what he lacks in intellect, he makes up for in brutality - I _know_. One of Lucius's little tools. And thank God - thank _God_ Lucius wasn't there, that he didn't catch you, or he would have had as much bloody fun with you as he did with me."

"Hum. Or _vice versa_, possibly." A technical problem to solve was always steadying - whether it was a problem in code or in tactics. "Given his, um, implied predilections, kneeling down is a really good position from which to find out whether it's actually possible to punch someone's diaphragm out through their spine... Don't look like that. That's what I meant about women being better at fighting dirty - gods know, that bastard's done you so much injury, but you're still just that wee bit - squeamish, just because you're a bloke."

"It's not that, exactly." He eyed her warily, his eyes still dilated and pitch-black; but at least he had stopped rocking. "You just sound so - cheerful about it. As if you'd really enjoy doing it."

"Damn' straight I would! Look, I wouldn't descend to his bloody level - I wouldn't do anything - lingering. But when it comes to humanely ripping the bastard apart I'm up for it. Him and that creepy Bellatrix bint. After what they did to you..."

"Yes." He smiled his flinching smile. "And then the, the charming bloody Ministry shut me up on my own again with the white light and the freezing cold and the memories, until I nearly went mad with memory." He sounded perfectly calm and rational again, if a little wobbly, but he was sheet-white and sunken in on himself with exhaustion; sitting up in bed leaning against the wall, with his arms clenched across his chest as if he were freezing, and his hair straggling across his eyes as it always did when he wasn't paying it attention.

Lynsey reached out, consciously moving her hand in the same slow, careful, unthreatening way she would do when reassuring a scared horse, and gently fussed the long strands off his face for him. He gave her a watery but genuine little smile at that, and murmured "It's not as if I was ever very keen on Christmas at the best of times. At home it just meant shouting and blows, and knowing that boys in other families got presents while I only got bruises - and Christmas at Hogwarts was all forced cheer and artificial twinkle and still no bloody presents. But this was - oh, God, I was in so much pain and they were all sitting round me eating and laughing, and I was crying because I should, I should have been to Midnight Mass and I hurt so much and I was so bloody hungry and always, always p-punishment instead of presents, and all the warmth and the joy in the world was for other people and none of it was for me."

Lynsey put her hand on his knee, meaning nothing by it except a little sympathy and support, but he suddenly caught her hand, raised it to his lips and kissed it. "But I was wrong, wasn't I?" he said, making an odd shrugging gesture with his head and shoulders, half wry and half flippant, and sitting up straighter. "God or the angels or the land or whatever you want to call it sent me some presents this year all right - just a few days late. Within a few days of that - ghastly revel they sent me my life back again, through you, and much more than my life: companionship and conversation; a new Patronus and a whole new field of magic to learn and study; music and laughter and a _very_ strange puppy - and what was possibly the first uncomplicatedly happy experience of my life that didn't involve potions!"

"Which was?"

"Sitting by a fire in the middle of a wood in the middle of Wales in the middle of winter, eating trout sandwiches!"

"Which tasted better than any Christmas dinner ever would or ever could" she agreed, smiling: "especially as they were the fruits of your own labour."

He smiled back at her gravely from his considerable height. "And eaten in such good company, too. Even though I was - even though I was exhausted and in pain, the whole thing was somehow - perfect. A holiday from all care."

"You used to sing with me," she said, quietly. "You used to sing with me, then - not just me singing to you. Or spells."

He looked at her for a moment, her hand still held slackly in his, and then looked away restlessly. "But then we were - nowhere. Usual rules need not apply, and so forth."

"And which of the usual rules says you're not allowed to sing?"

"Do you want me to write you a bloody list?" he snapped.

"You make me think of - " Diffidently, feeling embarrassed and awkward, she herself began to sing: "Oh dear me, the warld's ill-divided // Them as works the hardest are the least-provided..."

Severus laughed softly, recognizing the piece. "My father would have been glad of the chance to, but the mills in our town were all closed by the time I was five. All right. Years ago - _years_ ago I heard a snatch of a song on a Muggle radio, it was about a woman going to the mill, about how heavy her work was, but - " He shut his eyes and swallowed. Drew breath. Began.

"But Monday to Friday  
As I go up and down  
There are many gardens  
All about the town."

Even dry-throated and at four am, his voice was as lovely and as heart-rending as she remembered it. He gave her a glittering look, self-mocking and sad. "I tried for years to find the rest of it, but I never could. And I was never one for silver linings anyway, even though - " He took a sharp breath and then gestured widely at the room around him, Lynsey included. "Even though fate seems to have forced one on me, even so," he muttered, embarrassment spreading across his skin in a dull flush.

Lynsey wrestled briefly with the ethics of taking advantage of his vulnerable state to encourage him to do something which, in fact, he wished to be encouraged to do, and then disengaged her hand from his and raised it, as carefully as if she were trying not to startle a wild bird, to cup his stubbly cheek. His breath caught for a moment in nervousness and she saw him make a conscious effort to force himself to breathe more calmly.

Holding her gaze with his own, he rubbed the side of his jaw against her hand and she responded carefully by tracing his lips with her thumb, her own breath catching in her throat. When he put his hand up to clasp her wrist she leaned towards him; so she was already halfway there when his other hand snaked around her ribs and drew her into a tight embrace, his lips pressing against hers awkwardly, suddenly and hard.

Even so, his action was so abrupt that she yelped in surprize and he drew back almost at once, turning his head aside from her and looking confused and ashamed. But her hand was still against his jaw, his long fingers wrapped around her wrist; and when she pressed firmly against his cheek to turn him back to face her and then leaned in for another kiss, he stared at her wildly for a moment and then seized her to him again, his mouth searching for hers with as much enthusiasm as she could have wished.

* * *

**Author's note:**

At the end of _Mood Music_, Lynsey sang Severus to sleep with the song _Sally Free and Easy_, a modern British folk song written by Cyril Tawney in 1958. A popular cover version of this song was released in 1972 by the folk-rock band Pentangle on their album _Solomon's Seal_, when Severus was twelve years old and Lynsey fifteen or sixteen.

The plaintive song _500 Miles_ was sung by the American folk/pop band Peter, Paul & Mary on their first, eponymous album, released in 1962 when Severus was two and Lynsey five or six.

_San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)_ is a gentle, dreamy hippy anthem, written by John Phillips to promote the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and sung by Scott McKenzie.

_The Bonny Light Horseman_ is a traditional ballad of the Napoleonic wars, which exists in numerous variants. This one is from the singing of John Tams.

For the benefit of American readers, treacle is very similar to what you call molasses, except it can be obtained from either sugar cane or sugar beet (a type of turnip), and according to Delia Smith the flavour of treacle isn't as rich as molasses (I've never eaten molasses so I can't comment). It's near-black and not nearly as sweet or as runny as golden syrup (which you don't have either, and which is a pale gold form of molasses obtained when sugar-cane is first refined), but not as bitter or as stiff as black-strap molasses.

Admittedly the description of Voldemort coming to the Potters' house, as seen through his own viewpoint in _Deathly Hallows_, does not mention either a person accompanying him or any kind of spellwork. But we do not actually see whether anyone is behind him, and it seems unlikely he would have gone alone when he couldn't know that the Potters would be unarmed and unguarded. Dumbledore knew so much of what happened that night - enough to decide almost immediately, before he even sent Hagrid to rescue the child, that Harry needed to be placed with his mother's bloodline - that it strongly suggests he had an eye-witness. And Voldemort must have done something to turn Harry's intended death into a Horcrux.

Dumbledore said in HBP that he was sure Tom intended to make a Horcrux out of Harry's death, and it seems unlikely that he was wrong about that, because we know Tom _was_ intending to make another Horcrux - he later made Nagini into one - and the death of the prophesied vanquisher would be too significant a death to waste. It can't be enough just to kill somebody and, bingo, the nearest suitable object becomes a Horcrux, or it would happen all the time. It can't depend on something Tom was going to do after Harry's intended death, because if so he never got to do it, and Harry wouldn't have become a Horcrux. And he can't simply have set the process in motion before he came to the house and given it no further input, because in that case the Horcrux would have been created when he killed James or Lily. He must have done something after killing Lily and before attempting to kill Harry, to ensure that Harry's death would feed into the Horcrux - even though we don't see him do it.

An "area" in this sense is a sort of sunken front yard: a strip of paving the width of the house, about six feet deep and a storey below street-level, which allows a basement-flat to have proper windows. There is usually a door from the flat onto the area, and a steep stair up to street level, where there will be an iron railing.

Lemsip is a powder of dried lemon or blackcurrant, paracetamol and a decongestant. You make it up with hot water and sweeten it to taste - very pleasant and warming, and it soothes away your aches, clears your head and to a limited extent settles your stomach.

I gather from the comments of an American friend that Americans (some, anyway), don't have that distinction between drinking- and non-drinking water. Direct mains water, such as you would get in a kitchen sink, is considered drinkable. The water that feeds the bathroom basin may be from the mains, which is OK, or it may be coming from a cold-water tank, in which case it's not considered drinkable because of the risk that there may be things growing in it. ((At my secondary school we used to drink water which came from a cold-water tank, and then somebody went up in the roof and found that the lid was off and there was a very dead pigeon floating in it.))

"Bidey-in" is a Scots term for a live-in lover - a sexual partner to whom you are not actually married, but who "bides" with you.

"He on the ground lay crying" - from _The Bold Poachers_; "We rode on, and we sped on" - from _The Wee Wee Man_; "I'm a hand weaver to me trade" - from _The Weaver and the Factory Maid_; three traditional songs which appear on the Steeleye Span album _Parcel of Rogues_. You can hear samples of all three if you go to eMusic dot com and search for the album.

The "very strange puppy" to whom Severus refers is of course Remus Lupin, who decided at the end of _Mood Music_ that Severus was now his alpha male.

"Oh, dear me, the warld is ill-divided" - from _The Jute Mill Song_, written in 1964 by Mary Brooksbank who was herself a mill-worker in Dundee, although the song really refers to conditions and wages which were current before the First World War.

When I first wrote this, I really didn't know where the fragment "There are many gardens" came from. However, I managed to identify it some weeks later, after almost twenty years of searching. I had misremembered it, and therefore so did Severus - or perhaps the singer I/he heard on the radio had changed the words a little - for the chorus properly begins not "Monday to Friday", as I remembered it, but "For days' work and weeks' work". Its title is _To People Who Have Gardens_. The words are by the novelist and historian Agnes Mure MacKenzie of Stornoway and the tune is by Marion Macleod of Eigg. It was arranged for voice and piano by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser for her early 20**th** C collection _Songs of the Hebrides_. It must have been in Volume II, published in 1917, or in Volume III, published in 1921, because I own a copy of Volume I and it isn't in it.

When I originally wrote _Mood Music_ I didn't actually intend there ever to be anything more than a mild flirtation between Lynsey and Severus; but having committed myself to Lynsey's single viewpoint, I needed them to be together long-term in order for her to continue to witness the events of his life: and specifically, to be together at night, so that she could witness his unguarded sleep. And as it's turned out, she does seem to be rather good with and for him.

I imagine btw that Snape is exaggerating for effect when he says he _never_ got presents, even at Hogwarts.


	15. 14 Damaged Limitations

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**NOTA BENE:** Readers are advised to read the poem _There exists something that fits nowhere_ by Gunnar Ekel? before starting this chapter. The poem is referred to in the course of the chapter but is not quoted at length because doing so didn't seem to fit in very well at that point: the scene in question will make more sense if you already know roughly what the poem is like. It can be found at **w w w . whitehound . co . uk / (un)Familiar / poetry . htm** (just take out the spaces).

* * *

**14: DAMAGED LIMITATIONS**  
((_In which boundaries are drawn, and then scribbled all over._)) 

In the end, going seemed more awkward than staying, especially with him still so shaky and shaken, so Lynsey ended up spending the rest of the night with him, each of them keeping nervously to their own side of the bed and it was fortunate that it was a double, or one of them would have ended on their arse on the floor. But she laid her hand cautiously on Severus's arm, over the nightshirt, and he placed his hand loosely over hers, gruffly embarrassed and trying to pretend not to be, and she thought how thrilling it was to be sharing the little enclosed world under the bedclothes with him, adrift together in their own little private, mutual bubble, even with rather a lot of human night-clothing in the way and the heavy, faintly itchy presence of the cats nailing the blankets to the bed at their feet.

Exhausted by the flashback and by his own temerity in kissing her, Severus fell asleep fairly easily. Lynsey lay in the half-light of approaching dawn, watching his frown-lines loosen into a sort of quiet sorrow, and she hoped she would some day see true relaxation in his sleeping face, and that she might help to put it there. Hearing him ranting about that ghastly Christmas, on top of the images which she had seen of him when he used the Pensieve, had left her feeling shuddery and grey with the realization of what he had suffered, had still been suffering, for weeks before she found him in the heart of the chalk. The image which haunted her most was not one of the gory ones but something she had seen in his memory, a brief glimpse - himself half standing, half slumped naked against a wall, his head turned aside and down and his matted hair hiding his face, cringing miserably away from what was coming to him.

A kind of agonized pity was mixed with admiration, knowing that if she hadn't talked him out of it he would have handed himself back into that protracted hell to save Draco - pity, admiration, and horror that she might so easily have failed to save him, and she couldn't let any of them affect how she behaved towards him, or he would know and be mortified. And the image of him shivering and cringing like a whipped dog might be burned into her mind's eye but he was just himself, after all - just her friend and putative love-interest, as prickly and uptight and embarrassed and tentatively hopeful as he was. It would do him a disservice to turn him into some sort of icon of suffering, when he was so much more than that - so full of interest and incident.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the morning, she woke wondering why she felt so cold, and found that Severus had somehow wrapped himself up in all the blankets like a monochrome chrysalis, and left her with none.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She sat and contemplated him at breakfast, over his tea-cup and hers: scruffily unshaven and bundled up in a crumpled dressing-gown, his shoulders hunched around his ears and his stringy hair flopping over his forehead. He looked pale and exhausted and his skin had an unhealthy, waxy sheen: she realized that she must have it - whatever "it" was - very badly indeed, since he still looked attractive to her. "Stay me with flagons," she thought distractedly, "and comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love."

"What do you think," she said idly, into a silence which was otherwise broken only by the faint slurping of tea; "could you be comforted with apples, do you think?"

Severus gave her a quizzical look. "It would depend on the apple," he said seriously, evidently giving the matter some thought; "but I'm certainly amenable to being comforted with cider."

"About last night..."

"Yes," he said, flatly and unhelpfully, and she glowered at him, but softened when she saw how wary and uncertain he looked.

"It was... nice, I mean, not the bits where you were having flashbacks, obviously, but the, um, afterwards."

Severus relaxed perceptibly and gave her a cautious smile. "It was - invigorating. And God knows, I could do with a bit of vigour, at present."

"If you, um, wanted to do it again - I mean, not right now, obviously, but in general..."

"That would be..." He inclined his head in an acknowledgement which she was almost sure was positive.

"If you wanted a bit more vigour, or anything."

"Yes." A flicker of a smirk chased across his lean face. "Exactly how vigorous are you planning to get? I feel I should be forewarned."

"How vigorous would you _like_ me to be?"

A shadow displaced the smirk, and he winced slightly. "I don't really know", he muttered, not quite meeting her eyes. "Not so vigorous that I start bloody panicking."

"Moderate vigour. Check. I can do that." Now it was her turn to look away and down, awkwardly. "Um - about last night..."

"You're repeating yourself, O'Connor," the professor said silkily. He shifted to lean back in his chair, putting on a creditable impression of lounging insolence, and she bared her teeth at him like a cat.

"Leave it out, do. I'm trying to be serious. I mean - well, sharing a bed, you seemed to sleep better and... do you want to make it a regular thing?"

The black brushstrokes of his brows drew down, a sweeping curve and flare of india-ink. "Do you?"

"I think so. It was - "

"Nice. You said."

She clicked her tongue at him. "When you're in this mood, I don't know whether I want to kiss you or slap you."

Severus sipped delicately at his tea, looking at her sideways through his thick lashes. "But either way, at least I have the comfort of knowing that you are not - indifferent to me."

"Damn straight I'm not."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

And that, she thought, was maybe the truest word she had ever spoken. She still wasn't sure if she could call what she felt for him "in love", exactly, in that can't-think-of-anything-else sense - whatever it was she felt for him, it didn't stop her concentrating on a nice, knotty problem in applets - but she knew she was immensely, bottomlessly fond of him, even when he was at his most aggravating, and the nearness of him made her come over all tactile, so that she wanted to pass her hands over every plane of him in a way that was almost more sculptural than sexual.

Not that she looked like getting the chance, any time soon. They had taken, warily, to sharing her bed on a regular basis - though only after much reassurance on her part that it wasn't just an act of charity, and that she would still want to do it whether or not they ever put the bed to more active use. The clincher came when she pointed out that the mental link which had developed between them meant that she would wake up whenever he had an especially bad dream anyway, and it was much more convenient for her to nip his dreams in the bud, or failing that at least to rouse him from them, if she was already lying next to him and didn't have to get out of her nice warm bed and pad round the flat in the dark.

Severus did seem to sleep more easily for the sense of a friendly presence, but he wore a long nightshirt and kept very strictly to his side of the mattress, radiating a sense of personal space as effective as barbed wire; and Lynsey respected that space punctiliously and did not touch him except on the arm or shoulder, and that only when distress stirred him half-awake and shivering. She would have suggested that they shared a room but slept in separate beds, except that both her beds were doubles, and neither bedroom was big enough to take two double beds and still leave space to walk between them.

Even kissing was a potential emotional minefield. Smoothing his hair back with her palm was one thing, or placing her hands either side of his narrow face - but when she put both hands behind his head to draw him down into a kiss he jerked away in panic, shuddering and hyperventilating until she could feel his heart pounding in his chest as she laid a hand on him in puzzled concern, and she flinched and felt miserably guilty when she realized what having his head grasped and pulled down might mean to him. Cupping one hand around the back of his neck was acceptable though, and even appreciated - and she found that if she rubbed him gently behind the ears she really could make him purr like a cat.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Meanwhile, on other fronts things were progressing rather faster. Harry's threat to tell the press about how Scrimgeour had held Snape hostage to force his compliance with Ministry policy, coming on top of the scandal about Scrimgeour's sex-life and the uneasy sense that something unpleasant was breathing on the back of his neck, had got the Minister so rattled that he had authorized Minerva to re-open classes, although Hogwarts itself remained closed - perhaps wisely so, since it was known to be one of Tom Riddle's primary targets, and there was no longer any Dumbledore to protect it.

Many parents still chose to keep their children away from the Hogwarts staff, who were perceived as a lightning-rod for trouble, but the Ministry had commandeered a couple of vacant premises in Diagon Alley where the staff could hold at least basic classes for day-students aged fourteen and over who commuted in by Floo. As soon as the Easter holiday was out of the way Severus was due to start teaching four mornings of Defence training and two afternoon duelling clubs per week, and would at last be getting something approaching a regular salary again. Indeed, the Ministry had agreed to start paying the staff almost immediately, in respect of all the administrative work which they would have to do before the school opened.

It was to be hoped that since Severus would not actually be teaching Defence at Hogwarts itself, the curse which prevented any Hogwarts DADA teacher from lasting more than a year would not be activated.

There would be no house-divisions among this handful of day-students, at least in theory: but Severus still felt especially responsible for his Slytherins, and was anxious to see as many of them as he could. But many Slytherins, unfortunately, came from Death Eater families who would see them dead before they would see them taught by that notorious traitor, Severus Snape.

"Somebody has to look out for the little brutes," he said glumly; "even the ones who are just Death Eaters in waiting. And at least now I don't have to pretend to be one of them any more, and I can openly advise them against taking the Mark. That's one good thing to come out of being - being discovered."

"Will they listen to you, do you think?"

"I don't know - but I have to at least try." He fiddled absently with the cuff of his robes, scowling. "Most people think they're _all_ bloody trainee Death Eaters, or Dark wizards, and - well, Slytherins are Sorted on the basis of ambition, and that means I do - did - tend to get the ruthless and the psychopathic, because such children generally are very ambitious. Also the ugly and the abused, because the ugly and the abused so often feel so driven to prove themselves - which explains how I got in. But I also got the dreamers, the inventors, the ones who wanted to write the Great Wizarding Novel or find a better cure for dragon-pox, the ones who were willing to die for an ideal - whether it was a good ideal or not. And they are, all of them, my responsibility - even the ones who think that I deserved what I bloody got, and ought to have been left to rot."

The irony of it was that many of the other side still felt the same, and regarded him as a murderer who had got away with it on a mere technicality; but Minerva's support for him, both personally and professionally, was firm and unequivocal. They could, as she melodiously told more than one set of parents, either like it or lump it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Come away from that now," he said firmly, sweeping in in a flutter of black and producing a bottle of curiously-labelled wine from the depths of his robes, "and come 'n celebrate my first proper pay-packet in - " He stopped to think about it. "Ten months."

"Looks like you've been celebrating already" Lynsey replied, saving her work and standing up to greet him.

"Oh, Horace and I had a little post I mean _pre_prandial port in the Cauldron" he said happily, setting the bottle aside and sweeping her into an enthusiastic embrace. "No more relying on Potter's thinly-disguised charity, and having to be grateful to the little sod!"

"You're pissed, aren't you?"

"Only a little bit. Not too much to know what I want." He stooped towards her like a hawk and she rose eagerly to meet his kiss, and let him press her back until she was sitting perched on the edge of the desk with her hands on his shoulders and her knees either side of his hips.

"Port obviously has the same effect on you that it does on me" she said cheerfully, when he paused to breathe.

"We should definitely get in a supply," he growled, leaning in for another kiss with reckless and slightly clumsy enthusiasm, and she opened her mouth wider for him and rubbed the back of his neck in small, firm circles until he shivered against her with desire and she could feel his heart racing even faster than hers.

They were practically there already, she thought, his tongue was already doing highly suggestive things in her mouth, and a little judicious unbuttoning and unzipping and a slight shifting of the hips were all that was needed - and it would seem like a waste of golden opportunity not to. "Do you want to...?" she murmured against his lips, and drew his hand down to rest against the zipper of her jeans.

The change was as abrupt as if some cosmic switch had been thrown. He flinched violently away and stepped back out of her reach, staring at her through wild untidy strands of hair, his chest heaving. "I - no!" When she put her hand out towards him his shoulders hunched as if to ward off a blow.

Lynsey winced. "I'm sorry - I didn't mean to rush you, you just seemed so... ready."

Severus dropped his eyes, putting his knuckles up to his mouth as if the taste of kissing was surprising to him, and shook his head. "_I'm_ sorry," he muttered, a dull flush spreading along his jawline. "It's not that you're not - I do _want_ to. Very much. Theoretically. But I'm not sure that I could, um, 'get it up'. Not and keep it up for long enough, anyway."

Lynsey slipped off the desk and back onto her feet and laid her hand lightly on his upper arm, and this time he let her, although she felt his skin shiver through the dark cloth. "If it's partly an, um, mechanical issue, we - Muggles - have things that can help: there was a new treatment in the news only about six weeks ago. Don't wizards have, um, potions or charms that...?"

Severus twitched himself out from under her hand, snarling. "In bloody abundance. Don't you realize - " He spun about and began to pace, jerkily, a few steps one way and then back. "I had to, to use those charms, those potions, any time I couldn't fucking-well get out of it, that bloody lot all baying, cheering, egging me on to f-force myself on somebody when every bloody nerve in my body was screaming 'no' but I knew I was dead meat if I didn't, I couldn't - couldn't save them except by killing them and then their last moment would be me doing - doing that, do you think I'm so bloody perverse that I could have managed it without a charm or a potion?"

Behind Lynsey, the laptop squeaked as if stepped on and spontaneously re-booted itself, as random power lashed out from him. "Although I do know that the bloody - hydraulics work, the _fucking_ hydraulics" - he flashed her a horrible, skull's grin as he said it, baring his yellow teeth to the gums although his eyes looked mad with grief - "because I couldn't _not_ get it up when they were - inside me, tearing - when they used the same bloody charms on themselves, Ramrod charms, Engorgement - "

His panic, his distress was infectious but she didn't know what the hell to do with him, he had his head thrown back and his white face tilted towards the ceiling, she could see tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes as he ranted and paced, his long hands plucking desperately at each other and the last thing she wanted to have to do was slap him to snap him out of it - in desperation she grabbed his right upper arm with her left hand and as he spun round in fury to face her she seized the other arm as well and dragged him towards her, not quite embracing him. "Stop it! Stop it now. Breathe."

For an instant she thought that he would jerk away again, even hit her; but then he nodded once, sharply, and drew a deep, ragged breath, and then another and another, as she slackened her grip to something which was merely steadying rather than restraining. When he was breathing almost normally he looked at her, from so close to that she could have kissed the tip of his nose with little effort had she been so inclined, and said bleakly "Having to force myself to, to force myself on other people was worse than having other people force themselves on me, yus kin, and I'm ashamed that - that I should even bloody _mind_ what they did to me, in comparison, but it hurt so damned much - I tried not to but they - "

Moving slowly, so as not to provoke him into startling away again, she reeled him in into an embrace, and he let his head drop wearily onto her shoulder. "I remember you said," she said, "that if you had to - do that, you did it as painlessly and quickly as you could."

She felt his nod through her bones. "Yes. But when they... to me, they made it as bloody painful and protracted as they could. And whichever way you look at it it's all - tainted. I mean - sex. All that."

"Would you rather - rather forget the whole thing?"

He shook his head, and then broke away from her embrace and went and sat down on the off-white, probably-not-a-sensible-buy-when-you-have-two-dark-furred-cats settee. He leaned his elbow on the back of the sofa, rested his chin on his hand and gazed out of the window at the tops of the trees stirring against the sky.

"I want - I _do_ want to be, to be able to. I want to feel that - that I own myself, apart from the purely... pleasurable aspects." She could see his grimace, even though he was facing mostly away from her. "Kissing you is very - pleasurable and I do feel a certain... you know."

"Something stirring in the undergrowth?"

"Hah. Yes. But if I think about feeling it it just freaks me out, and the idea of using - using potions and charms again to force an erection is just - horrible. Ghastly."

"I'm sorry. I would never have suggested it if I'd known. I didn't think."

"Then you bloody-well should have done!" He drew a deep breath. "I apologize. You're not - familiar enough with my world to think in those terms as a matter of course, yet."

Lynsey sighed and sat down on the other end of the sofa, retaining a distance between them. "You're right. You'd told me that you sometimes had to... do that, but I hadn't thought about how you were able to. Magically speaking."

"It doesn't bother you?" he asked, his mouth twisting bitterly.

"Oh, it _bothers_ me all right, but not - it bothers me for you, not about you, if you see what I mean. It's a wonder to me that you're still bloody sane."

"I'm not sure that I am. I certainly - part of me is, is quite - hopeful, kissing you and, and the rest of it, but the rest of me is - sliding. Coming apart. I can feel myself bloody coming apart and I don't know how to stop it."

"Yes."

"I haven't - haven't hit bottom, yet," he said, turning his head restlessly. "It will be worse before it's better."

"That's what Poppy said." Lynsey was privately relieved that he still assumed that he would get better - but forbore to say so, in case he should decide, out of sheer bloody-minded perversity, not to.

"Poppy knows what she's bloody talking about." He turned back to face her, his mouth twitching wryly. "And even the - kissing and - you understand that part of me expects to submit to any sordid bloody thing anyone wants to do to me as if - as if the gutter is where I belong, which - part of me thinks is true anyway; and the other part can barely endure to be touched. Like somebody's bloody prissy maiden aunt. But I do appreciate that sharing a bed without actually doing anything about it is - peculiar, not to mention a waste of perfectly good opportunity, and I don't like to feel that I am... disappointing."

"That's all right, pet. It's nice to have a friend to curl up with - or next to, at any rate - even without anything else."

"Just like another bloody cat, in fact," he said rather bitterly.

"Well - you make a good hot-water-bottle on cold nights, and you do purr very nicely."

"Huh." He rubbed his hand across his face distractedly. "You know what today is, don't you? It's Good Friday."

"Yes. I did wonder - well, whether you were going to do anything for Easter."

"I can't, can I? Can't go to confession - the priest's mind might be read or, or even if I didn't say anything Riddle might want to know, He still might take any priest I spoke to and rip his mind open, just to see. I can't put anyone in that kind of danger; but then I can't go to mass either."

"I thought you might want to spend it in meditation or something..."

"On Sunday - on Sunday I'll light a candle and say my prayers, like a good little boy." The lines of bitterness tightened around his mouth. "But I'd rather get drunk than spend today meditating on the Wounds of Christ, and commit blasphemy by thinking that what I suffered was _worse_."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She woke to find him twisting and threshing in a tangle of sheets, jerking his head restlessly from side to side as if trying to shake something off and chanting "Get him off me get him off me get him off me" in a sort of flat snarl. She was still fuzzy herself but she dragged herself into full consciousness and tried to wake him - caught his face between her hands and tried to get him to look at her and he did at least open his eyes then, but he gagged and retched and spat "Bastard! Bastard! Get him off me get him off me..." and then suddenly lunged to his feet, stumbled blindly past Lynsey's reaching hands and somehow made it to the bathroom, where he crashed to his knees and was violently sick into the lavatory. She followed him and perched diffidently on the side of the bath, outside his personal space - trying to be supportive without being intrusive.

When he was through with the first violent spasm she fetched a dressing-gown and draped it round his thin shoulders, over the cotton nightshirt which was stuck to his skin with sweat. He stared at her with that blank, blinded look she was coming to know all too well and snarled "What did you think it would be like? Did you think being tortured would have been all - tidy and - and clean and all you have to do is save the poor victim and he'll be so fucking grateful and no trouble and - all easy and clean and no, no dirt, no shit semen vomit blood no piss no pus no pain no _poison_ - oh God - "

"Credit me with the rudiments of sense - I'd a fair idea what I was getting into. You're not imposing on me, pet - I volunteered for this with my eyes open."

"You must be mad!" he muttered, turning his face away from her.

"Nope. Just mindlessly brave."

"Comes to the same bloody thing."

"I happen to care about you, you loony. I'm not going to wimp out on you."

"I don't know how you can bloody stand me."

"Idiot. I've told you before, and I'll tell you again as many times as it takes to make it stick - you are not the one who has anything to be ashamed of, here." When he made no attempt to move but simply leaned back against the tiled wall, his eyes tightly shut and his face pinched in grey around the mouth, Lynsey came and sat down next to him so that they were just touching at the elbows. She looked away from him, and began softly: "There exists something that fits nowhere..."

Somewhere, as she spoke the calming hypnotic words of Ekel?'s poem, the professor's hand took hold of hers, almost surreptitiously. When those words had hissed away into silence like the receding waves, she sighed and said "Rinse your mouth out, love, and I'll make you a sandwich."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The sky was already greying into dawn and there seemed little point in going back to bed, which explained how Lynsey found herself sitting and contemplating Severus wearily over the breakfast table at 5 a.m. on a damp Saturday. He looked, if possible, even seedier and scruffier than he usually did, first thing in the morning, and his skin was the colour of old plaster, but he had lost the jangling tension he had had the night before - as if his outburst had lanced something and brought at least temporary relief. He seemed to be examining his own hands, folded whitely around a soothing mug of hot chocolate, but as Lynsey watched him he looked up and gave her a weary smile.

"I've decided," he said, quite calmly.

"What have you decided?" she replied cautiously, inwardly praying that it wasn't suicide or anything else daft or disastrous.

"I've decided I'm not going to let those bastards stop me from having a sex-life if I bloody-well want to."

"Oh! That's a good decide."

He gave her one of his best smirks. "I thought you'd approve. Only - only you're going to have to help me. I mean - more than is usual in these matters." He took a sip of chocolate, blushing slightly. "Not that I'm any expert, you understand."

"Oh, me neither, but I've at least, um, read a bit. If you... I'm guessing you _don't_ want to actually see a sex-therapist - "

"You guess correctly."

"And you know what they say - 'Good guessers never get married'. But I can hazard a guess at what a sex therapist would say, anyway, which would probably be to start with Sensate Focus."

"What's that when it's not at home?"

"Well, as I understand it it means that we - well, that we get used to touching each other and, um, being touched, on the, uh, non-sexual bits first and then - progressing. Knowing in advance that we're not even going to _try_ to have sex until you - we've got comfortable with the touching bit."

"Oh. That sounds - that sounds all right, actually." He smiled at her, wryly but sweetly and for once without the smirk. "I think I might - might actually be able to do that without making any more of a total bloody fool of myself than I have already."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

His hands on her skin were dry, light, tentative - as if he were thinking his way through a complex problem using his fingertips. His expression was contemplative and inwards-looking, a little frowning, and only the shortness of his breath betrayed his nervousness as he spanned her belly with deft fingers, running his thumbs softly along the edge of her ribcage.

When it came to her own turn, Severus lay down naked on his back on the bed with his arms at his sides and his hands fisted into the sheets, as rigid with nerves as if he expected to be punished. She looked at him for a moment, enjoying the view, then sighed and went and fetched her newest purchase and unfurled it over him, a fall of bright colour.

"What is it?" he said, squinting down at his own no-longer-bare chest.

"Duvet. It's like a - a very lightweight but warm quilt. Instead of blankets. Budge over." She slipped under the covers beside him, propped herself up on her elbow and trailed her left hand lightly across his chest and down to his flank, learning the shape of him. His skin was icy cold and shivered everywhere she touched him. "Shh - it's all right." She could feel the sharp lines of his ribs, and the faint, slanting bars of scarring where the lash had curled around his sides or a curse had scored him.

He turned his face towards her, as far as he could from that angle, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye, glittering and bright. "Talk to me," he said commandingly.

"Um - what about?"

"Anything, just - distract me. You never did tell me what a Klingon hunt was."

"Oh! - well - do you remember _Star Trek_, from when you were a kid?" She traced the line of a scar around his side to his back: he jerked at the touch and it occurred to her for the first time that he was probably very ticklish, on top of all his raw nerves.

"My family didn't run to anything as nobby as a telly until I was already away at Hogwarts, but - ahh! - vaguely. I do know what a Klingon is: but how does one hunt a fictional entity? Assuming you're not _The Quibbler_?"

"Well..." As her hand smoothed across his backside he flinched away so violently that she moved hastily on to the long muscles of his thigh, which she hoped had fewer unpleasant associations. "You get a bunch of Science Fiction fans - "

"Shouldn't that be 'Science Fiction fen'?"

"Uh - yeah, strictly." Sitting up and craning down towards the end of the bed, she pressed her palm against the sole of his foot, and winced to find it still hot and tender; but he flinched away again before she could assess the damage, and she remembered that if he was ticklish about the ribs he was probably even more so about the feet.

"If you're going to use arcane terminology, O'Conner, at least be consistent." She could hear the tension tightening his breath.

"Pedant" she said affectionately, stroking the back of her hand back up the other leg and onto his stomach, skirting anything too personal for the moment. "Anyway you get a bunch of fen in a big hotel - usually a hotel, but during the Eighties, before the police got too sensitive about IRA terrorists, there was a mass Klingon hunt held all round the Circle Line - that's part of the London Underground - and anyway sometimes they split into two teams, sometimes it's every man for himself and then basically they stalk each other around the hotel for an hour or two, with toy space-guns. It's terrific fun if the hotel has lots of side-passages and stairs."

"But how do you determine when someone has been hit - with toy guns?" She could feel him making a conscious effort to relax under her touch.

"Honour, basically - you trust the target to recognise that you got a clear shot at them, and to withdraw from the game. Or there are versions now that you can play in the woods with special guns that fire blobs of paint." She pressed the flat of her hand against his chest to feel his strong heartbeat, almost steady now that his nerves had nearly caught up with his conscious knowledge that she wasn't going to hurt him or make any unexpected grabs. "It would be easier to do it like your lot and actually fire wands at each other."

"It would, wouldn't it?" He shifted suddenly, lacing his fingers behind his head, and Lynsey tucked in contentedly against him with her head resting on his arm. "You've just given me a _very_ good idea on how to get at Dumbledore's secret books. Do you suppose the Ministry would let us back into Hogwarts to hold a Klingon hunt - as a training exercise?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It would be a long time, if ever, before he felt comfortable enough about being touched on bare skin to sleep naked, when the nightmare associations of nakedness still stalked his dreams; but she persuaded him to let her brush his hair while they were both bare, drawing the bristles through his heavy locks in long strokes, and making the same sort of "Ssss, ssss" noises she would use when grooming a horse. He grew to like the soothing, rhythmic touch, and no longer flinched when she put a hand on his scarred back to steady herself. And he became, in turn, less tentative about touching her, although he still passed his hands back and forth across her skin as carefully as if he thought she was made of eggshell. She herself had a fairly low opinion of her own body - lumpen, imperfect and sliding rapidly towards middle-age - so it was strange to find herself being handled like something precious and surprising.

On other fronts, the Ministry had agreed to let the school-in-exile have access to Hogwarts for training purposes over the May Day holiday weekend, when there would be only a skeleton staff manning the Ministry's new Scottish office. That gave them less than three weeks to prepare and, if possible, to work out how to get into the Ministry's spell-tracking system.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The mirror flashed and wavered where it hung on a hook in the wall, and a familiar blond, bland face appeared in the glass. "Severus, my boy," said the apparition, waggling its walrus moustache, and the professor lounged to his feet and walked over to the mirror's line of sight.

"Horace. Is there a problem?"

"Mmm - not a problem, precisely. Minerva has young Gregory Goyle downstairs in the office, saying that he and Vincent Crabbe wish to attend the day-school 'If Professor Snape's gonna be there', quote, unquote, and despite considerable opposition from their families."

The Professor folded his arms. "I find it hard to believe their families would let them come at all, considering that their fathers helped to - " He swallowed, and stared stonily ahead.

"Yes, well," the other replied chattily; "I gather there's been something of a rift in the lute in that department, and they are both now living with a mutual second cousin in Hartlepool. But young Gregory wished me to convey a message to you. I hope - hope it doesn't turn out to be anything unpleasant."

Lynsey, listening, winced and hoped that the boys mentioned were sincere, and that whatever was coming was not a coded threat from their fathers, at least one of whom she knew had played an active r?e in her friend's torture.

"Well, go on then" that friend said flatly.

"Well - I really don't know quite what to make of this, and I got the impression he didn't either, but he said I was to tell you that - that somebody he seemed to think was called Shredded Fishy had said to tell you that he was more well than could be expected."

Severus lit up like a candle, quite suddenly, the lines of resignation and wariness flaring into sudden eagerness. "Oh, God, Horace, ask him - go and ask him if it could have been 'Sredni Vashtar'."

"Well, I will if I can remember how to say it..." The atrocious 'tache disappeared from the glass.

"Pet...?" Lynsey started, but the professor waved her impatiently to silence, chewing on the side of his own knuckles in his anxiety until Horace returned.

"Well?"

"He said, and I quote, 'Yeah, summing like that'."

"Oh - oh thank God." He folded down onto the sofa rather suddenly, as if his legs would no longer bear him, and covered his eyes with an unsteady hand. Horace harrumphed in evident masculine embarrassment.

"Well, if you're sure it's good news I'd, ah, better be on my way, unless you'd like to tell me...? Well, perhaps another time."

Lynsey cocked her head on one side.

"Sredni Vashtar went forth,"

she murmured dreamily:

"His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.  
His enemies asked for peace, but he brought them death.  
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.

"So what was that all about?"

Severus put his hand down and looked up at her, his face utterly drained. "It's a message from Draco, thank God - to say he got away with it. That the - He - didn't punish him much, if at all, for his failure to capture me."

"Why 'Sredni Vashtar'?"

"It's - I would say it's private to him, but it's such common knowledge there's hardly any point. When he was fourteen, someone - someone pretending to be Alastor Moody, in fact - "

"Yeah - Minerva told me about that."

"This - person turned Draco into a ferret, and then knocked him around and terrorized him in front of his classmates. He had been misbehaving, and I as his house-father would have assigned him detention in private afterwards, but instead Crouch injured and publicly humiliated him which - well, which I suppose was only what you'd expect from a Death Eater. His pride was very much hurt, so I, um, loaned him a book..."

"Oh! You showed him the story about the ferret who became a dark god!"

"Quite."

"Cool! That's such a _witchy_ thing to do."

"I'm flattered you should think so."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Touching his back or his side was one thing; touching him anywhere more intimate had to be taken in tiny, careful increments, laying her cool hand over the fleshy heat of him for a moment and then moving away before he could begin to panic, until his body began to believe that she would do nothing painful or shaming. It took a week of gentle mutual exploration, of leisurely kisses and concentrated reassurance before he was even halfway comfortable about lying awake skin to skin; a fortnight before he would lie belly to belly with her, warming the cold knot of tension in his gut, and knowingly let her feel the physical evidence of his own desire without shying away.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She knelt astride him, feeling his warm pressure pressing up inside her, running her hands over the firm muscles of his chest and stomach and even brushing her thumbs experimentally across his nipples; but that pressure was receding, not growing. No more than half aroused and fading fast, he moved his head restlessly from side to side, muttering: "Oh, damn it's not fair - something that should be so - empowering but I can't do it anymore, it just makes me feel so fucking helpless knowing I can only be what they made of me - doll, puppet, useless thing, thing without volition... I don't own myself any more."

"If not you, who?"

"Whoever - whoever _wants_ me. That way."

"Which would be me then, at present. Logically."

"Yes."

"Then I give you back to yourself - that's simple, isn't it? I don't do anything to you without your say-so."

He stared up at her blindly, as if dazzled. "I don't know. Don't know. Lucius - "

"The hell with Lucius. Aren't I braver, cleverer, more virtuous than Lucius?"

He actually smiled at that, and gave a sleepy little chuckle. "Oh _yes_ - and with far more class!"

"_I'm_ telling you nobody owns you but yourself - I, me! Whom are you going to believe - that shady prick, or me?"

"When you put it like that..."

She smiled down at him, feeling the pulse and swell of renewed desire, within his flesh, held within her own.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was too much to expect that he would actually be able to achieve climax on a first attempt, with so many reasons to be fearful and so few to relax; but she found it drowsily pleasant to spend time just lying engaged together, languid and content, feeling that absolute closeness - feeling him as warmth inside her, touching as deeply and completely as it is possible to be touched - while her hands rubbed slow, lazy circles across his neck and shoulders.

"Mind-reading aside," she murmured contentedly, "this is the closest you can get to another human being."

"Yes" he said, shivering against her. "That's why it's so good to lie with someone you want to be close to, and so horrible to do it with someone you - don't."

"Ssh - nothing bad is happening, and nothing bad is going to happen. Lovely man, everything will be fine."

"I couldn't help it," he whispered, burying his face against her shoulder; "I couldn't not - respond, that way, when they - it just happens, but they cheered, and jeered, always, always jeering - the worst thing, the worst thing was that I didn't care, in the end, because even when they - heal you to tear you open again it hurts less than having your fucking toenails ripped out, and even though the, the shame is scalding all you can think about is pain."

And she could do nothing but hold him close, murmuring "Shh, shh. There's no pain for you here, there is nothing here for you but honour and praise. Let it be a cure for all pain, for a while."

* * *

**Author's note:**

"Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love" - _Song of Solomon_ 2.5, from the King James Version.

Note that cider in Britain is _always_ alcoholic: often quite drastically so.

Applets are tiny little custom-built applications which perform fancy functions on websites, and which you write in a programming language called Java.

To nip something in the bud is to stop it before it has properly started.

"Like it or lump it" means "Take what's on offer or go without".

"Postprandial" means "after eating", the usual time for consuming port. Drinking alcohol on an empty stomach is notoriously prone to make you very drunk very fast.

Note that in Britain "pissed" on its own means drunk, not annoyed. To be annoyed is to be "pissed off".

"... a new treatment in the news only about six weeks ago" - Viagra was licensed for use in the treatment of impotence in late February 1998.

"Sofa" and "settee" are interchangeable terms.

"There exists something that fits nowhere" - from the poem of that name by Gunnar Ekel?. If you didn't already read it before starting the chapter, you can find it at **w w w . whitehound . co . uk / (un)Familiar / poetry . htm** (just take out the spaces).

"Good guessers never get married" is a saying of my Irish grandmother's.

"What's that when it's at home?" is a common, if now slightly old-fashioned, British response to an unfamiliar term.

The subject of Klingon hunts was mentioned briefly in _Mood Music_, the story to which this is the sequel, while Lynsey and Severus were chasing and being chased by Death Eaters through the long tunnels in the dark.

A "nob" is a slang word for an aristocrat, so to be "nobby" is to be up-market.

A "rift in the lute" is a weak spot opening up and spreading through a situation or a relationship which had previously seemed sound.

_Sredni Vashtar_ is the title of an extremely sinister short story by Saki, in which a lonely, sickly boy who knows he isn't expected to live to grow up designs his own warrior-cult around the big hob ferret he keeps in a hutch at the end of the garden, and prays to it to rid him of his cruel, oppressive aunt.

Readers may also be interested in an essay called _But Snape is just nasty, right?_ which you can find on my website at **w w w . whitehound . co . uk / Fanfic / **(just take out the spaces). A writer called **seomensnowlocke** posted (on ffn, which is really against the rules) an essay called _Why Snape Does What He Does_ which irritated me so much that I felt impelled to write a complete rebuttal, explaining the reasons behind Snape's sometimes difficult behaviour, and this essay was the result.


	16. 15 Old School Ties

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**15: OLD SCHOOL TIES**  
((_In which, among many other things, a very Auld Acquaintance is renewed._))

**N.B.:** The previous chapter, _Damaged Limitations_, received only half the usual number of reviews and only about two-thirds the usual number of hits. This leads me to suspect that for some reason a lot of regular readers missed seeing it: if you're one of them you need to back-track now.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You look tired," he said softly, coming into the flat on a breath of cold air and crossing to stand behind her chair, where he peered over her shoulder with what was, by now, reasonable understanding at the Style Sheet she was working on.

"Mm," she agreed, rotating her neck in an effort to loosen it, and rubbing absently at her own collar-bone. "I want to get this finished by tomorrow night, which isn't going to be easy with Beltane tonight and three hours' sleep, so I've been doing as much as I could today: but I don't want to give myself a Repetitive Strain Injury."

"Stop that," he said sternly, and she felt his deft fingers brush hers aside and begin to work their way firmly into the cramped muscle, rubbing and kneading. She relaxed back into the chair and let him, impressed at how well he had absorbed the technique just from being worked on himself... or had he already known how to do it? In the day he was for the most part this competent, even commanding creature; but the night brought desperate conversations in the dark while he raved and shook his way through some surrealist horror or other, made all the worse by knowing that the gist of it was miserable truth, even when dreaming blurred the details into hallucination. Sometimes, when the memory was especially traumatic, small objects around the room would explode and she had learned not to leave drinking-glasses or bottles in the bedroom or, gods forbid, the laptop.

Sometimes he took the Dreamless Sleep potion which Poppy had left for him, and then Lynsey got some sleep, too, instead of sitting up with him while he ranted himself sane again, and then lying awake for an hour afterwards fretting about him. But to go without dreaming every night would drive him mad in the long term. And it was a good thing that years of listening to the cats' stereo snuffling had left her fairly hardened to night-time noises, since the man snored like a tractor. Nevertheless, as deeply asleep as she might be, his shuddering distress was still enough to wake her.

She had expected that resuming teaching would leave him exhausted, as weakened as he still was: but so far he seemed to find the return to familiar rhythms invigorating and Minerva's support, her willingness to back him against a world which still largely reviled him, had eased something in him, Lynsey thought. As he was doing to her. She moved her neck again, more freely this time. "Much better. You're good at this, you know that?"

"I hope to be good at many things." He flexed his long fingers, grimacing. "You didn't tell me it hurt," he said plaintively.

"Does your thumbs in, doesn't it?" she replied sympathetically. "There's a way round that if you're doing a large area."

"What?" he said, sucking at the base of his thumb and looking consciously martyred.

"You take a hardish ball about an inch and a half across - that's what that rose-quartz ball in the knife-drawer is for, if you were wondering - and roll it up and down the affected area, using the palm of your hand. Much less trouble on the joints. But it doesn't work for bony, fiddly things like shoulders."

"Bony and fiddly describes me to a T, doesn't it?" he said lightly, stooping to give her a brief, rather tentative peck on the lips, and she tipped her head back for him to make it easier, and drew him down into a proper kiss. As far as their putative love-life went, they hadn't actually got as far as anybody actually achieving actual climax: but after several failed attempts Severus had at least stopped either shaking like a leaf or snarling at himself for his own weakness, and accepted that slow progress was better than no progress. Lynsey privately suspected that stopping worrying about it would prove to be half the battle.

"The Ministry have given us clearance to Floo from the day-school to Hogwarts on Saturday. You're sure you want to come? I can assure you it's not going to be nearly as interesting as you probably think."

"I wouldn't miss it. And I _am_ the only expert on Klingon hunts you've got."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

But first, before that, she had to show him something more of her own world. Before the May Bank Holiday Weekend came May Day itself, and before that Beltane, and the dancing on the heights. They drove down to Edinburgh in gathering dusk and he came with her up the steep-sided hill, his hand clasping hers rather nervously, to be pushed and jostled by the crowds swinging across the hillside below the fake Acropolis in the dark, stumbling as the weight of the congregation pushed them over the edge of a drop and bumped them down three feet onto the path below. The fire burned and the procession of the dancers swept through the darkness as the men dressed as red demons capered and gibbered and were driven back...

It was beautiful, as ever, but as unsatisfactory as it had been since the first few years of the festival, when the people on the hill were all believers and the army came to drum the darkness out. Then it had been real, or as real as a festival whose own organizers viewed it as Performance Art could ever be; but in later years it had for the most part been ravers and sightseers who came; the fire was choking with plastic rubbish and the midnight ceremony was not at true midnight, only at 12 p.m. by British Summertime which meant an hour earlier, and nobody thought that this mattered because nobody really meant it or really cared at what point the sun was truly underfoot and she resolved, as she resolved every year, not to come again. But it was one of the few occasions in the year when she could wear robes in public and not feel like a fool. The chance to go out dressed as herself was too good to miss, especially this year with Severus at her arm like a mantling eagle, striding out in his billow of black.

"I thought there would be power there," Severus said to her quietly, long after midnight as they made their way back down the steep, nerve-rackingly worn and irregular steps of wood and earth which would bring them out in Waterloo Place. "I thought it would be like it was in the caves, that I would feel the living earth again, but there was almost nothing..."

"There used to be, there was once, before the ravers took over. I don't know if the ravers drove the power away or if the festival died because the power is dying everywhere, but if you want to feel true power..."

The broad streets were almost deserted, just a few revellers trailing home from the Beltane Fire and the odd drunk or two, and it felt odd to be driving through such emptiness, even knowing that Kingsley Shacklebolt was wheeling somewhere overhead under the protection of Mad Eye's second-best Invisibility Cloak; but she took the car over the great cold span of North Bridge and down the tooth-rattling cobbles of the Royal Mile, around the side of the palace and into the vast darkness of Holyrood Park.

The land-locked cliffs of Salisbury Crags towered over them, as if they had stood at the bottom of an ancient sea, with the looming black outline of the lion slicing across the stars. "What is this place?" Severus asked quietly as they clambered out of the car, an edge of tension in his voice.

"Extinct volcano" Lynsey replied succinctly and he gave her a wall-eyed look, evidently not much reassured. "That - that hill there that looks like a lion - that's Arthur's Seat."

"Huh!" he said under his breath. "I spent most of my life on the boar's back, and now I shall be under the lion's paw." Lynsey remembered him telling her, in that other darkness deep under the chalk, that "Hogwarts" was probably a corruption of "hog, Art's" - the boar of Arthur.

She looked up at the crown of the lion's head where it reared above them; so unmistakable from this angle that it could be nothing else. She had always imagined the lion suddenly rising up, shaking the earth from its great mane and standing over the city, poised to kill or to protect. "A party from the Church of Scotland used to climb Arthur's Seat at dawn on May Day to bathe their faces in the dew - I dunno if they still do, but I always thought it was ironic that that was probably more authentically pagan of them than my lot leaping about on Calton Hill in tights and greasepaint. And they don't expect a bloody Arts Council grant."

She led him to the wide, sloping green skirt at the foot of the cliffs, all silver now and shadows, and urged him to lie down with her, flat on his back on the grass alongside her, his long fingers twined with hers. Moonlight silvered the edge of his sharp profile and glinted in one black eye as he turned his face towards her in the darkness.

As they lay there side by side, spread out flat against the skirt of the grass, she could feel her perception sinking into the ground around her, growing like roots, until she was aware of absolute position, of how the world stretched out around and away from her, everything in its place everywhere. "Can you feel it?" she said, as the sense of the power under the earth struck up through her spine, buoying her up as if over shifting, uncertain depths.

"Yes," he replied softly. "The heartbeat of the world."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Saturday morning dawned bright and cold. In view of the present troubles Diagon Alley and even (at least in theory) its dark twin had been warded against direct Apparition, so they were going to have to come in _via_ the entrance from the Muggle world, and Severus was duly dressed in a cream shirt and black slacks, his robes slung over his shoulder in a bag. Lynsey too had her duffle - the same one which had been with them all the way through Chislehurst Caves - stuffed with robes and clean undies, although she had been assured that the Hogwarts house elves would take care of the laundry.

They Apparated from the area under cover of Muffliato, while the Order's agents kept watch, and landed in Trafalgar Square right next to a fountain. Nobody except the pigeons noticed their sudden arrival. Some quality in the magic seemed to prevent them from actually materialising in a space which already had a body in it - and given that fact, arriving in the middle of a crowd actually worked quite well, since anybody who saw them appear assumed they had just stepped out around somebody else.

Tonks met them by one of Nelson's lions, the very image in bronze of that greater lion which watched over Edinburgh. Today, her hair was a natural-looking golden-red, styled into a smooth shiny bob like a Twenties flapper's, and she was dressed in an amethyst-coloured jump-suit. "Still in black and white, I see," she said to Snape chirpily. "Even your mufti is sub fusc."

He frowned at her for a moment and then relaxed, evidently deciding she wasn't really mocking him, as such. "It's the price I pay for being pale," he said wryly. "My skin takes colour from anything I wear. If I wear blue, I look cyanosed; yellow and I look bilious... I tried wearing green to inter-house Quidditch matches, to show willing, but it made me look as if I was going mouldy."

"Yeah, I see what you mean," Tonks replied, absent-mindedly developing a leaf-green streak through her gleaming hair. "'s a good thing sub fusc suits you, isn't it?"

Severus made a harrumphing noise and turned away to stalk through the crowds of tourists, irritably brushing off the inevitable pigeons as they plucked at his sleeves, hoping for grain. Lynsey would have liked to linger and buy a poke of corn for them from one of the vendors, but they were working to a deadline. The professor led her across the traffic to a tiny, shabby-looking pub at the start of Charing Cross Road, where the three of them retreated briefly to the lavatories to change into their robes. Lynsey felt indescribably freer, more centred and more engaged with the world around her once she could feel the flutter and weight of loose cloth settling across her shoulders, with the belt and the brass buckles and the feeling that now, at last, she was dressed up as herself.

The clientele at the bar were odd-looking, even by the standards of a university town like St Andrew's, but she didn't get much chance to stare before she was ushered through into a scrubby bit of courtyard at the back. A few authoritative taps on the back wall with the sycamore wand which she had made for him, and the bricks twitched aside and re-sorted themselves into an archway which let onto a winding, cobbled street.

Apart from the curves it looked, Lynsey thought, like a cross between the little complex of streets at the back of St Martin's Lane which occupied this same space in the Muggle world, and Rose Street in Edinburgh - except that at first sight the merchandise on offer did not look as esoteric as that sold in St Martin's Lane, or as eccentric as what was on display in Rose Street. But the closer she looked, the odder it got. Those weren't video displays flickering in the window of _Game for Anything_, but animated chess pieces, busily bashing each other with tiny swords. The petshop sold what looked like real live Tribbles, although Severus assured her they were called Puffskeins, and to her regret he steered her firmly past _Don Juan's Dungeon_ before she could get a closer look at what appeared to be a wizarding sex-shop. There was an entire specialist emporium devoted to what at first glance appeared to be falconry equipment, but which proved to be intended for the care and upkeep of carrier-owls.

And the customers were odder than the goods. After meeting so many members of the Order of the Phoenix she had grown accustomed to the wizarding world's luridly ill-assorted fashion sense, but many of these were simply not human. She should have been used to that too, after knowing Remus and Hagrid, but it was different seeing a crowded street in which goblins made up a substantial minority, at least as common in this inner world as Japanese tourists were in the outer one. Severus quietly pointed out the goblin-run bank to her: a large white building somewhat in the Georgian mode, with a flight of steps leading up to the burnished bronze doors. Fiercely independent, the goblins had protected his assets, such as they were, from the Ministry, although he was only now being allowed access to them again.

At least the goblins treated him with the same blank disregard with which they appeared to view all humans. Far too many witches and wizards, seeing the professor approaching, drew aside from his path in a way which was just a little too pointed to be polite. After the third person had deliberately turned their back on him Lynsey threaded her fingers anxiously through his: he gave her an irritated sidelong glance, his brows flaring like a crow's wing, but the desperate tightness of his grip belied his apparent unconcern.

At his right hand, Tonks sauntered along beside him, looking surprisingly like trouble, and turned her nose up at the ill-wishers. Literally: Lynsey actually saw the end of the girl's nose change shape in order to dismiss them more effectively. But it was an unpleasant thought that he had to run this gauntlet of scorn every working day, even if he did have another Order member with him to watch his back at all times. She thought she would have been less worried about him if he had seemed to mind it more: there was something horrible about his patient acceptance of public obloquy.

That the wizarding world was deeply troubled could be seen just from looking; about every sixth shop, on average, was boarded up, and many of the shoppers had a harried, frightened air. Only the goblins appeared unconcerned.

Two large, adjacent premises, one of them apparently a former ice-cream parlour, had been converted into a small day-school. Crossing the threshold, Lynsey had a surreal moment where she thought she had somehow stepped into some sort of Welsh theme-park, so crowded was the room with high black hats. The Hogwarts school uniform seemed designed, as Pratchett had once said about the traditional jester's costume, to make the wearer look like a pillock. She tried to imagine Severus as he must have looked as a schoolboy, a scrawny little moulting crow of a child with his stringy hair and his boot-button eyes and his long nose fighting for pre-eminence with the ridiculous pointed hat, and was stranded somewhere between amusement and wincing pity. He had always been odd; isolated within a culture which might seem to an outsider to value oddness, but did so only within its own regimented rules.

But at least when these youths stepped back out of the professor's way there was wary respect on their faces rather than scorn, and Minerva, Filius and Poppy, who were to go with them to Hogwarts, greeted them both with a warmth which did not seem to be in any way false. Pomona Sprout was to meet them at the school: along with Hagrid, she had had to be given permission to continue to come and go freely in order to attend to her collection of exotic plants, many of them things which no self-respecting Ministry employee was willing to go within fifteen feet of.

A large fireplace at the far end of the room was flaring green. As Lynsey watched, at once intrigued and appalled, pairs of eagerly chattering children were stepping into the flames, quite casually, and apparently being whirled away. "If your curiosity is _quite_ satisfied..." she heard the professor say in a disagreeable tone and she turned to him in surprise, thinking it was her he was addressing - but no. His sourness was reserved for Neville Longbottom, who was gazing at him anxiously, his bun-like face crumpled with concern and some hurt.

"I just wanted to see... to check that you, you know, that you were all right," the boy mumbled, and Severus sighed, the tense muscles of his arm relaxing under Lynsey's hand.

"I am, as you can see, functioning adequately."

"Yes, well, that's - great sir, I mean... I didn't just mean if you were in working order, tha knows, but whether you were - well, feeling OK. 'nd, mm, Hermione and Harry were worried too..."

Severus quirked an eyebrow at him in sudden amusement. "And you drew the short straw?"

The boy visibly relaxed and gave the older man a shy grin. "We all reckoned, I'm already so scared of you it kind-of can't get any worse..." Lynsey was impressed: evidently he'd remembered what she'd said about accepting a joke against himself and taking ownership of it.

"Yes, well, Longbottom - I couldn't seem to make you scared enough of the consequences of careless brewing to be careful, and if I'd left you to find out the hard way you might not have lived to profit by it: to say nothing of blowing the rest of us to kingdom come alongside you. So I had to make you as bloody terrified of me as I was of you."

"I didn't, uh, _mean_ to blow things up..."

"But that's the bloody point, isn't it? Doing things you don't _mean_ to do when you're handling poisons and explosives is a short cut to an early grave, and if you're going to blow yourself up I'd rather you not do it while I'm stuck in the same room." He grimaced, rubbing absently at his temples as if he were tired, which would not be surprising after the disturbed night he had passed. "I do however appreciate your... concern. Both now and - when I was in Azkaban."

"That's all right, sir." Neville smiled again, ducking his head as he did so, made a vague automatic grab to recapture the toad which was halfway out of his breast pocket, and went to join the crowd filing through the fire.

When it came to their turn Lynsey linked her arm firmly through the professor's, shut her eyes tightly and stepped forwards, trusting to him to see her safely through.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Oh, gods, that's worse than Apparition!" The world was still spinning, and she clung tightly to the table in the little pub.

"You would prefer balancing on a broom in a freezing storm?" Severus said interestedly.

"I'd prefer the car - honestly. Or a horse."

"I could introduce you to a Thestral... but you probably wouldn't be able to see her."

The pub looked like an ordinary pub, although the labels on the bottles had an odd look, and the end of the building up by the fireplace was clearly extremely old. Severus promised to bring her back to sample the eccentric bottles before the end of the weekend.

The village, when she had wobbled unsteadily out into the sunlight, looked like an ordinary southern Scottish village, almost, or a young town; although the fancy Victorian iron lamp-stands were authentic rather than repro, the street was cobbled and the wares in the shop windows were subtly strange. The post office, which Severus pointed out to her as a curiosity although it was several doors down in the wrong direction, had apertures below the eaves for owls to come and go. The greengrocer's had some very strange-looking vegetables in among the usual baskets of broad-beans and okra and leeks, and the pet-shop sold hippogriff-chow in jute sacks. The sample images in the window of the photographer's shop pointed at her and whispered to each other as she walked past.

At least, she hoped it was her they were pointing and whispering about, the Muggle come among them like a fish out of water, and not the professor. As they walked up the canted street he indicated an earth-floored track which wove away between the buildings to the right, on and up to a low hill on the top of which was a ramshackle small house, and in the distance behind it ruins which her eye refused to focus on - "The Shrieking Shack," he said grimly, gesturing with his white hand, and she knew that that was where Remus had once, so many years ago, very nearly eaten him.

On and up they all marched, towards the mountain that reared against the sky, with the children chattering around them like a crowd of excited crows; past a clothes-shop with a display of eye-tormenting special-effects underpants, until the road divided and bore away to the right into a winding lane, a double line of hedgerow bending round the base of the hill on which the Shack stood and then snaking away across bleak-looking fields, up to -

Every time she tried to look at it it slid away from her: she knew her point of attention was being diverted, and yet she could not overcome it. There was a stone wall - she could see that, although she could hardly look straight at it for a second. To the left, dark trees loomed above the stone and there were mountains behind them and further left, to the west. To the right, bright morning seen through clouds, and other mountains in the distance, the wall snaking away to the north, ruins catching at the corner of her eye - Severus took her hand as they walked, his fingers digging into the pressure points of her wrist, and he muttered something under his breath, the wand gripped in his other hand - and suddenly she could look straight ahead.

There across the fields, approaching as they walked, was a great gate, flanked by pillars topped with winged boars. Behind it, half hidden by the wall as it grew nearer, the half-seen ruin resolved itself into a fantastically turreted and crenellated castle, springing from the top of a great grassy mound which was indeed, as she could see through the approaching gates, shaped somewhat like a sleeping pig.

The giant, Hagrid, was there to let them in, he nodded to the professor amicably as they went through amongst the flock, but Lynsey could feel the shiver travelling through her friend's arm. Harry's friend Hermione was regarding him with clear-eyed concern, and Lynsey remembered that the last time he had been here, he had been fleeing disaster and ruin for the murder he had refused to commit. Minerva said something quietly to him which she failed to catch, and he nodded abruptly.

The green rolling grounds stretched away ahead of them. There was some sort of stadium to the right, and on the left the dark bulk of the forest. As they walked up the sweeping slope of the carriage track she could see a wooden house at the edge of the trees at her left, something like a Swiss chalet but rather oversized and obviously scaled for Hagrid, and the silver expanse of a loch glittered in the sunlight to their right, stretching away from them to curve round behind the castle.

The castle itself was breathtakingly bizarre. At some point, probably, there had been a proper defensive fortress, a great multi-storeyed brick of a building perched high on a cliff above the water, but the seventeenth century fad for cod castellations and decorative turrets had been allowed to run riot here, enhanced as it was by magic. She had often thought that Rosslyn Chapel, beautiful though it was, conveyed a slight hint of somebody having run amok with an icing bag. This place had the same sort of manic elaboration, turrets sprouting from spires sprouting from towers like some sort of insane Mandelbrot set, set in stone. It reminded her rather unfortunately of her favourite quote from _Blake's Seven_: the architectural style, she thought, was Early Maniac.

As the long drive swept up towards the castle they passed close by the side of the loch. There were trees and bushes at the water's edge, including a great beech with a skirt of grass at its foot which looked an ideal, inviting place to sit in the sun, and she wondered why Severus's face darkened as they passed it, and he turned his face aside from it as if he could not bear to look. Nor would he look at the tall, wide-topped tower beside the front door, instead turning the bleak ivory mask of his face the other way to stare resolutely leftwards towards the projecting mass of the West Wing, and Minerva on his far side shot him a glance of anxious pity.

A Ministry official met them at the door, unctuously wary, and ushered them in. Most of the ground and first floors was off limits but they were allowed to cross the vast, chequered floor of the entrance hall to reach a long high-roofed dining-room. The ceiling of the long hall, arching two tall storeys above them, was some sort of screen, set up to play a live image of the high and windy sky outside - Lynsey thought that it must be quite unnerving when it rained. There were four long tables, she supposed for the four student houses, and a shorter table crossing at the top for the staff. Some of the older students started to drift towards what would have been their house-tables and then turned back in confusion, seeing that places had been set at only one table, and that for not much more than half of it. The hundred or so of them that were all that there were wound up huddled together, under the naked eye of the sky.

The food - which appeared on the table "as if by magic" - was excellent, but Lynsey could scarcely enjoy it for watching Severus, who ate steadily in a tense, nervous, mechanical way, eyes downcast and shoulders hunched. From what little she knew of the circumstances under which he had departed from the school the previous summer, it was perhaps not surprising that he saw this return as an ordeal rather than a homecoming. The fact that Minerva, Filius, Poppy, Hagrid, Neville and Hermione and, yes, she had to admit it, Lynsey herself were all watching him covertly as if they thought he might explode at any moment probably did nothing to soothe his raw nerves, either.

After lunch they split the children up into teams, chattering and anxious, and sent them off at five-minute intervals to stalk each other through the bowels of the castle. Severus had dug out a spell - one of his own devising, from boyhood - which could be cast quickly and silently and which turned the subject bright yellow with magenta stripes. Affected students were required to report to Madam Pomfrey, who would detain them from the game for twenty minutes before applying the counter-curse and sending them back into the fray.

Harry and several members of his Dumbledore's Army magical self-defence club were acting as officers and impromptu tutors. A DA member accompanied each team to monitor and improve its performance, and if they were hit they were trusted to stay around, observing, and not take part in the battle until their twenty minutes were up.

Lynsey drifted after Severus like the tail on a kite, feeling ridiculous: but he had warned her not to wander off and explore on her own, because the castle was full of hidden pitfalls - some of them literal. He for his turn swirled and strode down the interlacing corridors, intersecting roving bands of students, alternately coaching and hectoring them (there seemed to be little difference) on stealth and speed and aim, and occasionally pausing to turn himself or Lynsey the right colour again. The only time he admitted to being grudgingly impressed was when a girl called Luna Lovegood came up with a Disillusionment Charm so effective that he trod on her foot before he realized she was there. She said "Ow" in a rather vague voice which still seemed to be coming out of thin air, even after you knew where she was.

The castle was crazily complex, an incredible eight storeys high, with side-wings and add-ons and mushrooming turrets in every direction. The second floor in the main building could be the third in one of the annexes, or the first, or somewhere in the middle between two storeys. There were windowless rooms under stairs, and blind steps which used to go somewhere, and now ended in a blank wall. The West Wing stuck out at an odd angle, nearer to the brooding dark forest than the rest of the building, and there was an empty-windowed tower there which Severus said contained owls. Looking out at it from a stone-framed window, at the front of the building and several floors below, they could see the birds flitting out like ghosts, even in daylight.

A garish black and white marble stair swept up through the building from the main entrance, but there were other stairs, some of which, she was warned, had intangible treads - perfectly visible, and yet not really there - or went somewhere else on alternate Tuesdays. Even the main marble stair couldn't be trusted to always go to the same floors, and the corridors wormed their way back and forth through the building, now on the courtyard side and now facing out across the grounds, where flurries of rain chased each other across the grass and ruffled the surface of the loch.

The most disturbing thing to Lynsey was the paintings. She had got used to the moving, interactive photographs in the _Prophet_, but those performed only a simple range of actions, and were silent. Even the more sophisticated images in the photographer's shop had only whispered together in a tinny rustle, like an overheard Walkman, too faint to make out individual words. The first time an elderly, oil-painted wizard leaned forward with his elbows resting on the inside of his frame, as if he stood in a solid and three-dimensional world behind the surface of the canvas and looked out at them through a framed window, and greeted Severus with a hearty guffaw and an enquiry as to who the "totty" was, she nearly had heart-failure.

And when they stopped by the staff room at three o'clock for half an hour of afternoon tea and biscuits (shaped, rather disturbingly, like newts), the twin gargoyles which guarded the door grinned and mugged and whispered to each other in high, camp voices, eerily reminiscent of Frankie Howerd.

"Whose idea was the gay double-act on the door?" Lynsey asked, sipping her tea.

"I've no idea - they've been that way since I was a boy."

"Do you suppose that they... you know - when nobody's about?"

"I shudder to think," he said, shuddering.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

As they rounded a corner to see the shadow of a student's heel disappear through the door onto a stairwell, a suit of armour suddenly moved and muttered, and Lynsey yelped and shot sideways, cannoning into Severus. There was a crack and a burst of colour up ahead and then he was cursing under his breath, trying to turn his shoulder back to its normal crow's-wing black. Along this corridor, there were classroom doors on either side, and the corridor windows opened onto deep bays between the classrooms, letting in the light. Stripes of light and shade lay across the floor, all the way along, and something half seen flew past them at high speed, tittering, and dumped a paper bag full of what proved to be itching powder over both of them.

When Poppy Pomfrey had de-itched them they found Ron sitting on the edge of a bed, clutching the bridge of his nose as blood dripped down his chin onto his hideously orange T-shirt, and Harry and Hermione hovered over him. "Oh, heddo, p'fessa" he said mournfully.

Severus scowled at him. "And what, may I ask, happened to you? Did somebody push you down stairs?"

"N' n' - 's Peeves - hit me inna face wi' a helmet."

"Peeves," Hermione said, "has been rather entering into the spirit of the thing - unfortunately."

"Peeves has altogether too bloody much spirit" Harry muttered, as Poppy bustled over and handed Ron a glass of something the colour of rust.

"Blood-Replenishing Potion," she said cheerfully. "Drink up. Will you do the honours, Severus, or will I?"

"I will." The professor tipped Ron's face up with his bony fingers. "Hold still, Weasley!" He pointed his wand along the boy's long nose and muttered _"Episkey!"_ Ron yelped as the bone shifted and knit, then rubbed at it ruefully.

"Thanks."

Severus snorted. "Peeves is _all_ bloody spirit, Potter - that's the problem. There's nothing corporeal we can use to catch the little sod."

"I've been wondering," Harry replied - "you don't think that Protego could be stabilized and shaped into a bottle...?" They went into what Lynsey, grinning, recognized as a techno-huddle, from which occasional intelligible phrases such as "dependent on the phase of the moon", "seven times clockwise" and "idiot boy" emerged.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

After dinner Severus took her by the hand and led her, his boot-heels tap-tapping softly along the stone corridors, passing behind an arras and up a straight, neglected-looking stair which somehow jumped at least one floor, along and around a passageway of polished wood and up the sweeping wind of another stair and there they were almost into the sky, the lake glimpsed through the windows was terrifyingly far down, eight storeys and all the height of the cliff they stood on, and there was another gargoyle which shifted and rattled its stone wings unnervingly until Severus muttered the password which Minerva had given him - "Cullen skink" - and it sprang aside. A door opened behind it, sliding aside in two leaves like an electronic doorway to reveal a sort of revolving escalator, a spiral of shallow, moving stone steps which Lynsey stepped onto with relief, as being the most nearly familiar-looking thing she'd seen since Trafalgar Square.

When they reached the small landing at the top of the stair, she saw Severus hesitate with his hand on the brass griffin doorknocker of a heavy, old-looking door of polished oak. After a moment he sighed, let the griffin fall softly and pushed the door open without knocking.

The door let onto a sizeable circular room, with a carpeted floor and windows facing out in four directions: the curtains were open and she could tell from the light that they seemed to be entering from the east, although they were now so high above the ground that she hardly dared to look. The first thing Lynsey noticed was the framed portraits, dozens of them ascending the walls between the windows, one above the next, so that she felt as if she was trapped at the bottom of some bizarre stamp-collection - or of a viewing gallery, for several of the portraits were awake and more were stirring, staring down at them with interest. There were several small tables which had been pushed against one wall, their tops crammed with odd-looking silver instruments which looked like refugees from an especially unusual exhibition of modern art. On the other side of the room a fireplace stood dark and empty, and she wondered for how long the grate had been cold.

Facing them across the room was a very large desk with clawed feet, bearing a silver ink-pot, a scarlet quill and a luridly tartan biscuit tin, placed defiantly in the middle as if marking territory. Behind that was a high-backed chair, and behind that again were shelves which bore among other things a very patched and shabby, collapsed-looking pointed hat and a glass case containing a straight-bladed, Saxon-looking dress-sword, polished and gleaming, its metal neither steel nor silver but somewhere in between, with a crescent-shaped silver guard, a walrus-ivory grip and three great pigeon's-blood rubies set into the pommel. Years of fencing-practice at school and of occasional historical re-enactments since made Lynsey itch to break it out of its case and try it - it looked beautifully balanced, and she thought that the sword would sing for her.

Severus was standing as straight and rigid as a wax figure, staring fixedly at the tartan tin as if he hated it, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, refusing to look up as the portraits murmured and whispered together. "What? What?" demanded the fat, red-nosed man in the portrait behind the desk, rising from his faded green-velvet armchair and clapping an old-fashioned brass ear-trumpet to his ear.

"Nothing which need concern you, Fortesque," said a firm but aged voice from further up the wall, and Lynsey's professor flinched to his bones, a shudder chasing across his pale skin. "Severus, look at me please," the voice said gently.

"No," the professor said flatly, and Lynsey winced at the misery in his voice: then felt a small unworthy surge of triumph at the fact that he had chosen to bring her with him, had elected to include her in his bubble of private pain, instead of shutting her out of it.

"Since I imagine that you came here to consult me" the elderly voice said, rather less gently, "this is going to be somewhat difficult if you expect me to address the top of your head for the entire conversation."

At that Lynsey's professor jerked his chin up as harshly as if submitting to some form of punishment, his eyes blinded with tears, and faced the gold-framed portrait which hung high above the sword in its glass case.

"Good," said Albus Dumbledore, nodding to them both from behind his half-moon spectacles. "I venture to hope that I am more interesting to look at than the carpet, which has seen better days: although I suppose that the same could be said of me."

Lynsey's first coherent thought, on getting a good look at the late great Headmaster, was "Good grief - and I thought Severus's nose was weird." The former Headmaster's proboscis, if not quite as large as her friend's, was much more baroque; being liberally provided with bumps and bends and ending in a curious blob, such as might be found on the snout of a hedgehog. There would certainly have been little danger of his glasses sliding down his nose, even if he had not been converted into oil-paint.

He was dressed in violently green satin robes decorated with bumblebees and bunches of grapes, his silver beard spilling down over his chest and the ends tucked into his belt. Penetrating light-blue eyes watched her friend closely.

"Dumbledore," Severus said thickly. "Albus, it's all gone wrong, because of me. I told - "

"I know," the old man said gently.

Severus blinked. "How?" he said, brought up short in his litany of self-castigation. "Minerva said she hadn't spoken to you - "

"And she has not. I wish that she could have done, but I was unable to, ah, catch her on her own before the Ministry took over these halls. You understand that I was - well, that I hovered between life and death for some time, as far as I understand it. By the time I was - that is, that this image was - fully activated there were always people with her. Ministry officials whom I did not entirely trust."

"If you trusted them an inch you're a bigger fool than I take you for," muttered a sardonic-looking, goateed wizard dressed in green and silver, who stood in front of a serpent banner in a portrait which hung at Lynsey's left hand. "And that would be an achievement of some note."

"Yes, thank you, Phineas," Dumbledore said quellingly. "In any case, the fact of the matter is that I could not tell her the truth of your position when there were others present who might be in Tom's employ, even if I had decided that it was safe to compromise your security by doing so, and I would not pretend, to her or to anyone, that you were at fault in relation to my death: an issue which they were bound to raise with me. Therefore, I kept silent, and practised my snoring."

The very faint beginnings of a grin tugged at the corners of Severus's mouth. "That's a contradiction in terms, old man - your snoring is never silent."

The ex Headmaster snorted gently and waved his painted hand. "Sit down, Severus, do - both of you. You're making me feel guilty to have this excellent painting of an armchair available to me, while you are both standing."

Severus flourished his wand irritably and two plain but quite comfortable chairs appeared in front of the vast desk. Lynsey sat down in hers rather gingerly.

"And you would be the young lady who helped Severus to escape from Tom's tender mercies," the old man said, gazing at her with those penetrating blue eyes.

"Um - we helped each other."

"To be sure. I have always found Severus to be - most helpful, where it mattered."

"I am here, you know," Severus said, without much rancour.

"I can't tell you how glad I am for it," Dumbledore replied soberly. "Please believe that I am truly sorry that you should have suffered so much, and that I was not able to protect you from the Ministry at least. As you know, I had intended to come to your office, obviously sick, and have you perform the final service in such a way that I would have appeared to have expired naturally. That there might be witnesses to my death was a thing I had not anticipated."

"But you just assumed the world and everyone in it would conform to your personal agenda, as per bloody usual," Severus said wearily, "and then Draco's sudden access of efficiency upended your plans."

"Quite. I confess I had rather underestimated young Mr Malfoy."

"You didn't answer my question, how you knew what I - that I - "

The portrait suddenly looked ineffably smug. "Why did you think I always said I didn't care what honours they stripped me of, so long as they left me on the Chocolate Frog Cards? I may not be able to speak through them - they're only low-quality images after all - but I have eyes and ears _everywhere_."

Severus began to laugh, weakly. "I always knew you were a devious old sod, Dumbledore, but that really does take the biscuit."

"Language!" said a hard-eyed witch on the wall opposite Phineas, rapping the side of her chair sharply with a heavy white-wood wand which looked more like a vicious cane. Severus flinched visibly at the sound of wood hitting leather, and then hissed in irritation and cast a bubble of Muffliato which excluded all the portraits except Dumbledore and -

"If you would put away your ear-trumpet, Fortesque," Dumbledore said firmly, and then added "Thank you," although he was in no position to see whether the corpulent old wizard had complied or not (he had). He twinkled at them both. "Here, perhaps more than anywhere, it is a truism that 'the walls have ears', but there are occasions when constantly being overheard by the portraits can get a little tiresome, and I say this from a position of direct personal knowledge."

"Can I ask you something?" Lynsey said suddenly, irritatingly aware as she spoke that she ought really to have said "may I?"

"Most certainly." He turned the twinkle towards her, in a way which gave her a vague urge to slap him.

"Are you... still you, do you think?" Beside her, Severus turned and looked at her sharply.

"You mean, am I the real Albus Dumbledore," the portrait said, "or just an artificial construct which only behaves like Albus Dumbledore?"

"Mm, something like that. I'm sorry of it's a rude question."

"Not at all. I can assure you that I am fully conscious - although of course, I would say that, even if it were not true."

"I know you're conscious, old man," Severus said roughly. "I can _feel_ you."

"I wondered if you were... a sort of thought-form," Lynsey said, "a created entity, or actually a kind of _cul-de-sac_ incarnation of the real Dumbledore. An, um, loop off your own time-line." She hoped very much that it was the latter - Severus would feel so much better if he thought he really was talking to his dead friend. And she would see if she could have a wizarding portrait made of him, so that if he died in the war she need not lose his silky, acerbic voice. She would still be able to feel his spiritual presence, of course, even if he died - but she would miss the voice.

"I'm not sure how one could tell," Dumbledore replied, "but I certainly feel to myself as if I am the real me, except that I never need to eat unless I wish to, or require a chamber-pot. Just as this chair seems to me to be a real chair, and this room I sit in seems like a real room."

Severus looked at his old friend in sudden interest. "And when you go from portrait to portrait, how does that feel to you?"

"It varies according to my mood, and where it is I am going. Sometimes it seems as if I merely walked from room to room, although I don't always remember to imagine a door: sometimes as if the scenery around me simply changes."

"It could be - _could_ it be a special form of the astral?" the professor said to Lynsey, his hawk face brightened and animated. "It could, couldn't it?"

"It sounds like it, doesn't it? In which case - Headmaster, you probably are you."

"I'm relieved to hear it, though even the most advanced wizards have never really been able to plumb the mysteries of death and spiritual identity."

"Muggles have... other techniques," the younger man said. "Lynsey gave me a very practical demonstration while we were fleeing from - Him."

"You actually went into this - astral? Into something like where I - where I am now? Although I'm not sure that 'where I am' is an applicable term."

"Oh, I did more than that - I turned myself into an imaginary mongoose, and chased Tom's tail for him." He scowled and rubbed tiredly at his temples. "But he got my tail, good and proper. That's why I - why I came."

"I imagined that you had not gone to all these lengths just to have a pleasant chat - as much as that would please me."

"If you're so bloody all-knowing, you know that I - that they broke me. That I... spilled my secrets like bloody water."

"I had gathered... something of the kind, yes. Filius nearly always has a Chocolate Frog or three about him. I am more sorry than I can say that you had to suffer such a shocking experience: I had hoped that your apparent involvement in my death would spare you anything of the kind."

"I should be bloody used to it, shouldn't I, after what the Aurors..." He grimaced and shut his eyes briefly. "It's not really your fault, old man. I'd have chosen to fight Him, I think, even if you hadn't bullied me into it - at least, I tell myself so. But it _is_ your bloody fault that you told me so much - couldn't you have kept silent the way you usually bloody did, and not told me secrets when you _knew_ it might come to this? Now Riddle knows nearly every bloody thing that _I_ know."

"There were reasons, as you know, why I thought it would be better if you knew about Harry's mission. Had Percy Weasley not headed Voldemort's plans for a takeover of the Ministry off at the pass, if it had still seemed likely that you would be appointed as my successor and that I would be able to continue to guide you through this portrait, then I would have told you far less. But fearing that the Ministry as it stood would not - forgive me - would not be likely to appoint a former Death Eater as Headmaster, and that the curse on the Defence position meant you were unlikely to continue just as a teacher, I knew that whatever I told you before my death would have to suffice, and it needed to be enough to enable you to assist Harry."

"Yes, well, now the bloody - _He_ knows about it."

"But you have a plan, of course. I've never known you not to have a plan, Severus."

"Yes. Now that - Riddle knows that at least some of His Horcruxes have been destroyed, it seems likely He'll try to make more. We - the Order - we are considering adapting the Ministry's surveillance spells in order to detect any attempt to make a Horcrux: but to do that we need to know what the spell is. We need those Dark grimoires, Dumbledore."

"You don't have anything suitable in the collection of curious volumes which you think I don't know you keep behind the false panel to the left of the fireplace in your quarters?"

"Nothing in sufficient detail, no."

"Very well. But I cannot tell you where they are."

"Albus, _please_." His fingers were gouging into the arm of the chair. "I can't see any other way to put it right - please don't make me beg."

"You misunderstand me: I said 'cannot', not 'would not'. I am not the Secret-Keeper for that particular secret."

"Who, then?"

"Murcus."

"The Mer-chieftainess?"

"The same. Or her heir, in the event of her death."

"Then the books are...?"

"As you surmise. It was the securest protection I could think of, and they are the least likely folk to fall under Tom's influence, or to attract his attention."

"Very well. Will she trust me with the information, do you think? Many people - many people still see me as your murderer."

"Ironic, under the circumstances - not that I hold your disobedience against you. Say to her - " he pursed his lips and produced a shrill, warbling cascade of sound - "and she will listen. Had you seemed likely to succeed me as Headmaster, I would have retrieved them from her and left them where you could find them in any case."

Severus repeated the musical words back to him until he was note perfect, then looked down at his hands, flushing. "You should have let me die for you, old man," he muttered. "We wouldn't have been in this mess if you'd let me die for you."

"Come now, Severus," the older man said sternly, peering down at them over the tops of his glasses. "If you had tried to defend me we would all have been lost, including myself and Harry - as I'm quite sure you know. And although the curse was progressing more slowly than we had feared, I would still probably not have lived long, especially without your skill to maintain me. I had so little life left in me, while you potentially have so much - quite apart from the tasks which I still needed you to perform, I did not begrudge giving up my few remaining months to preserve you, perhaps, for decades."

"Foolish," Severus muttered, moving his head restlessly. Lynsey shifted to lay her hand gently on his arm, over where the mark had been, and he put his other hand up to cover hers. "I'm not worth it."

"I happen to think that you are," Dumbledore said firmly. "You know that I have always held you in high regard."

"_Do_ I?" the other snarled, snapping abruptly from shame to bitterness. "I thought that I was - oh, what was it now? That I _disgusted_ you."

For a moment the old man's painted features looked surprised - frightened, even. "No I - I never said that. Or if I did, I never meant it."

"Liar! I was so - fucking - _frightened_ but I came to you and you told me I was disgusting anyway, because I had only asked Him to spare Lily and not all of them - as if I would have had any fucking chance of getting him to spare all of them. Lils was all I could save - I thought I could save - but you told me how much you despised me for it, and then asked me to pay you for saving them. As if I wouldn't have done anything - _anything_ - to put right what I'd done, just for the asking."

"And this could not have been addressed at any point during the last sixteen years, Severus? I really don't think that this is the time or place - "

"What other fucking time or place _is_ there? You tell me that!" He was breathing in rough gasps like an overridden horse, and Lynsey watched him anxiously and wondered about pneumonia and scarred lung tissue and relapses.

"I - " The image of Dumbledore stared down at him for a moment, frowning, and then abruptly turned his back. Lynsey saw Severus flinch at the apparent dismissal, his stark features bleak with pain, but the old man hunched his shoulders and said, without looking at them, "I think now that I was - overly harsh, especially in the light of your later services to the Order."

"My services as you call them didn't stop you from tormenting me with my own guilt after Lily died!"

"I... yes. In retrospect, I find myself somewhat in agreement. In my own defence, I reacted badly because I could see myself, my own mistakes, repeated in you, and so I perhaps blamed you unduly for faults which were more my own than yours."

"How could you - " Severus sounded honestly bewildered. "What did you ever have in common with the likes of me?"

The painted man turned his head so that he was looking back over his shoulder, visible in profile but meeting no-one's eye. "Only that I too had once let bad company, foolish political theories and the love of my own cleverness lead me into a situation which - which resulted in the death of my own sister. When I saw that you had done the same I assumed that you were - as selfish and stupidly self-absorbed as I had been; but having got to know you better I no longer believe that that was the case."

"I wish you had told me. Why now? If you had told me then it might have made me less - less destroyed by my own guilt. Why _now_?"

"Because now may be all the time we have left." The portrait sighed, a tiny exhalation, and turned back to face them. "Because I have reason to think that the redoubtable Ms Skeeter is hot on my trail, and I value your good opinion too highly to want you to learn first from her pen what you should have learned from me."

"Because you value it, or because you _need_ it?" Severus muttered, almost under his breath, and Lynsey was pleased that he had realized the difference and accepted that being liked, rather than simply useful, was a thing which could potentially apply to himself. "Nobody on the staff except Horace gave me the time of day when I was a student - you were all too wrapped up in dancing around bloody Black all the time."

"Come now, Severus. If you had a student such as Sirius in your house - so very clever, but from such a Dark family, the son of an insane mother, the ringleader of a gang, always making trouble, headstrong, reckless, without empathy - would you not watch him at all times? Pay him special attention, in the hopes of steering him onto a less destructive path?"

"Well - yes, all right, I suppose so," he admitted grudgingly. "Minerva did say that you thought the reason he tried to kill me was because he had... mental health issues."

"I'm afraid that for much of the time poor Sirius was barking in more senses than one."

Severus gave a little snort of laughter. "You'll hear no arguments from me on _that_ score. But that doesn't excuse the years of bloody persecution I endured from James - he was a spoiled little shit who kept his brains in his balls, but he was sane enough."

"If I had known how unhappy you were... but your talent for Occlumency was already apparent, and you were always a peculiarly difficult child to read. Please believe me that if I had known the extent to which he and Sirius were harassing you I would have asked Minerva to intervene, but to my sorrow I thought that you were - well - exaggerating matters, on those few occasions when you did complain. It seemed improbable that they would be able to do the things you alleged, and yet not be caught by any staff. I didn't know that James had an Invisibility Cloak, of course, let alone that he was using it to stalk you, and I most certainly did not know at the time that they had invented a surveillance device which would enable them to catch you when there were no teachers anywhere near. Although, _mea culpa_, I suppose I should have realized that Sirius's mania might lead James into a _folie à deux_.

"You, on the other hand... I did worry about you, you seemed a neglected and a lonely child, but once Horace took you under his wing I was less concerned, and I never had any serious doubts about your character: despite your attempt to make yourself appear more sophisticated by cultivating an appearance of being involved in the Dark Arts."

"Yes, well," Severus muttered, "If you'd been a working-class half-blood stuck in Slytherin House with Rosier and Avery and that lot, you'd understand why anything which made me look 'cool' was a life-saver - possibly literally."

"Horace and I never took your pretensions to darkness very seriously: the hexes which you imagined we didn't know you'd invented suggested a humorous rather than a truly malicious disposition, and I always thought that you would someday be... an asset to those of us who opposed Tom. That was possibly why I was... perhaps harder on you than I should have been, later. Horace used to boast about you in the staff-room, you know: you and Lily Evans were the two best students he'd ever taught, as he never forbore to tell us. I don't think any of us had the slightest doubt that you were more intellectually and psychologically sound than Sirius: even Minerva was wary of him, for all that she tends to put her own house first."

"And you didn't? After that stunt you pulled in ninety-two, whipping the House Cup out from under my children's noses?"

"That was for Harry, not for the greater glory of Gryffindor."

"And of course, if it comes to a conflict of interests between me and the sainted bloody Potter, I'm always going to lose, aren't I?"

"Oh, Severus..." The old man steepled his painted fingers and sighed. "Seven Slytherin victories in succession, and I _know_ you cheated."

"Minerva cheats too" Severus replied sulkily.

"Of course, of course, all the Heads of House do - even Filius does, on the quiet. But you were so much better at it - I thought it wouldn't hurt to, ah, level the playing field a little." He sighed again, tapping his fingers against his chin. "But I wish now that I had levelled it: I see now that it would have been far better to have taken the opportunity to engineer a draw between Gryffindor and Slytherin, and used it to promote inter-house cooperation."

The battered, fraying hat which lay slumped on the shelf several feet beneath him shifted like a wakening snake, and Lynsey levitated about three inches off the chair from a sitting start as it opened up a tear near the brim and drawled "_Now_ he realizes..."

"Yes, thank you," Dumbledore replied rather coldly.

Severus pushed his hair back from his face with both hands, looking weary and sad. "Inter-house cooperation is one thing we _have_ achieved: there are too few students left to maintain separate houses."

"You will achieve victory too, Severus: I'm as sure of it as I can be."

"Even despite my - betrayal?"

"That is not the word which I would use for it."

"What, then?"

"Just - humanity. A failure to be an invulnerable machine, in the face of overwhelming pain."

"But I _should_ be a bloody machine - I have to be what's needed!"

"No!" the other man said sharply. "Lose your humanity and you've already lost the war, where it counts. And in any case, I think you may win because of what you choose to call your betrayal. It wasn't how I myself had planned matters, but it seems to me that the likelihood that Tom will now make another Horcrux will enable you to pinpoint him and carry the battle to him, and that may be no bad thing, so long as you can also destroy the others."

"Potter has managed to locate Slytherin's locket - you know that the one in the cave was false? - and I believe I may have a lead on the Hufflepuff Cup. And Potter - Potter suspects that he might be a living Horcrux himself, like Nagini."

"You know that I have long suspected that this is in fact the case."

"He asked me to kill him, Dumbledore! He asked me to kill him, if it comes to that, and I don't know if I can, but better that than leave him for Riddle to kill. If - if it has to be."

"You still hope to find a solution which will enable him to survive, as you tried to do for me?"

"You know damned-well that I do," Severus answered roughly. "If - if there's truly no other way to bring Riddle down then I suppose... But I'm damned if I'm going to stand by and just let the bloody brat die, after all the years I've spent trying to keep him alive, without even trying to find another solution."

"I venture to doubt that you will succeed where I have failed," the older man replied somewhat frostily.

"Do you now?" the professor snarled. "And you are such an expert on the Dark Arts, of course, that no-one else could possibly know better?"

Dumbledore's portrait sighed. "If you can find a solution I have missed, so much the better - but I have reasons to believe that the boy must be killed by Voldemort himself, if he is to die. Because of the - nature of the link between them, it may be that Harry _can_ only die if he is killed by Voldemort - and if Harry cannot die, neither can the thing which I believe has lodged inside him. The fact that the Horcrux survived Harry's encounter with basilisk venom does suggest that it cannot die unless he does."

"If it must be, it must - but I refuse to just accept it until I have explored all the other options _myself_." He rubbed wearily at his eyes, blinking. "That was why you always favoured the brat, wasn't it? Because you knew that you were raising him for slaughter, and you felt _guilty_ about it."

"Severus..." The old man looked uneasy, even shifty, Lynsey thought.

"What?"

"Do not... seek to dissuade him. From being willing to die. There is a chance that - well, that if he is perfectly willing to die, the willingness itself may suffice. I do not wish to say more."

The professor gave him a long, thoughtful look, and then nodded abruptly. "Very well."

Albus Dumbledore inclined his painted head. "I hope that you are right, and that the situation can be resolved in a way which enables Harry and yourself Severus to survive. But I can hear him, and Minerva, waiting downstairs, so perhaps..."

"I always wondered how you knew," the younger man said restlessly. "That people were downstairs, I mean."

"I have an arrangement with the gargoyle. You should go now, Severus, and rest, for you would be best advised to speak to the Mer-chieftainess at dawn. The conch to summon her is in the cabinet by the door, and if I might make a suggestion, Harry has prior experience of the mer-village and would probably be the most suitable person to make the actual - retrieval."

"Very well. But I wish..."

"What do you wish?"

"I know the Frog Cards are only low-grade images, but I wish there was some way we could take your image with us, still consult you..."

"What would happen," Lynsey said suddenly, "if you took one of those magic photo' thingies of the portrait?"

"A portrait of a portrait?" Dumbledore replied. "I'm not sure."

"I'll ask Colin Creevey,, Severus said with a rather shaky laugh. "If anyone knows how to do it, he will."

"Very well: it would I admit please me still to be able to speak with all of you on a regular basis, so long as you do not use me as a prop for your own lack of confidence. Even I must acknowledge that there comes a time when there must be fresh hands at the helm, that are not my hands, and you have passed well beyond the limits of the plans which I laid down for you while I was alive. And Severus - "

"Yes?"

"Ask the house-elves to box up the instruments for you: you may find them useful, and I'm damned if I'm going to let Rufus Scrimgeour have them."

On the way out, Severus opened the large black lacquer cabinet which stood near the door and took out a substantial conch-shell, strung on a strap. Next to it, between it and the door, Lynsey noticed a tall golden perch, big enough to carry an eagle, with a tray of soft ash at its foot.

As she followed Severus's stiff back out through the door, Lynsey heard the Headmaster say softly "Miss O'Connor." She looked back at him warily.

"Yes?"

"Take care of him for me. I value him more highly than he believes, even if I haven't always shown it as I should."

"I do try - to take care of him, I mean. And he takes care of me too, of course."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

At the foot of the revolving stair they found Minerva, waiting patiently, and Harry, who was waiting rather less patiently and was kicking his heels against the wall.

"How is the old coot?" Minerva asked, as she turned towards the stair.

"Irritatingly all-knowing as ever. And - Potter. A word please."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He led her back down the long walk to the entrance hall, and further down: there was a door at the side of the stair which opened onto steps going down into the dark and he took her hand to guide her descent. As they went, he flicked his wand into glimmering light, and the soft ball of illumination showed a long tunnel stretching off into distance, unlit torches studding the walls at intervals all along their route.

"Gods," she said, "this takes me back."

"You can see why I felt quite at home in Chislehurst Caves, once you had - once I was no longer being - "

"Yes."

He flicked his wand again, and the torches flared in a _whoosh_ of sudden orange flame.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He pointed out his classroom and office to her as they passed them, on the first level below ground; but his private flat lay much deeper, at the same level as the Slytherin common-room and lower dorms, so that he could be immediately on hand if there was any trouble among his Slytherins during the night.

"Along there" - he nodded towards the end of the corridor - "there's another spiral stair which goes straight up to a cubby-hole just along from my office. I used to use it as a short-cut if there was any trouble in the castle during the night, but I prefer to avoid it if I can: I don't know about you, but spiral staircases always make me dizzy."

"Ugh, yes. How did you _know_ if there was any trouble, and you all the way down here?"

"Listening spell," he said tersely. "Set to wake me if there were any loud noises which sounded like an attack or a student in real difficulties. Potter managed to get me out of bed once - I'm sure it was him, Cloak or no Cloak - by dropping a charmed toy egg which sang in Mermish. It sounded like somebody having their throat cut." He shuddered, and Lynsey realized unhappily that he probably did know what that sounded like.

"The moon in a bucket" he said to the dark doorway, and the door sprang aside and admitted them.

It was clear at once that the house-elves had been busy. Although the place had been empty for eleven months there was a banked fire burning in the grate, and the room was free from dust. Outside, the sun was setting, and only a dull gleam reflected off the surface of the lake to show where the water covered the sill and came partway up the glass of two deepset windows.

The room had a comfortable but slightly down-at-heel look, with a rather battered couch and one armchair by the fire, and a rag-rug on the hearth. In the corner of the room there was a small potions workspace, with a stone bench, two cauldrons set over miniature braziers and a Belfast sink. There wasn't much to look at that wasn't books, and Severus crossed the room with a sigh of contentment and began to run his hands over the leather and cloth spines, rank on rank of books on shelves stacked up to well above head-height.

"Feels good to be back?" Lynsey asked, and she thought that the question was a rhetorical one. It came as a surprise when he answered her.

"I don't know," he said slowly, frowning. "When I was a child I used to feel so - _sick_ with dread every year as we came up the drive, knowing that Potter Senior and his little gang would be hunting me as soon as the Sorting Feast was over - although of course I dreaded going home, too. It got easier after Lucius left, though - at least I didn't have _that_ to worry about any more - and Horace's little Slug Club gave me some sort of sanctuary. As an adult... as an adult the school has been my sanctuary, my home, my career and my prison. I don't know whether I love it or hate it - just as I never knew whether to worship Dumbledore or strangle him."

"Do you think Harry really will have to sacrifice himself?" she asked sombrely. She had grown quite fond of the dark, intense young man with the roadkill haircut.

"Merlin, I hope not. Politics aside, I want to see Lily's killer destroyed, but to do so at the cost of her son's life is just - ghastly. I can understand the possible necessity, though I don't have to bloody like it: but I wish you could have heard how - cold Dumbledore was about it, the first time he told me. I used to think that he - that he loved the damned brat and that I was nothing to him in comparison: but now I wonder whether I should envy Potter his so-called love or pity him for it."

"He does seem fond of you, though, in his own peculiar way."

"He _says_ he is - was - yet often he seemed so utterly blind to my feelings; he _humiliated_ me in front of the whole bloody school by pulling that stunt with the House Cup at the last minute, without even warning me, and I don't know if he got some warped pleasure out of making a total bloody fool of me or whether he just - didn't understand."

"He said he couldn't read you properly because you were shielded, didn't he?"

"But any normal bloody person surely would have realized..."

"Mm, but I wonder if he isn't slightly autistic. A lot of abnormally tall, very clever people are, and it would explain some of the things you've said about him - why he never cared what people thought of him even when that seriously harmed his interests, for example."

"I always assumed that was just him being eccentric."

"Mm, but a lot of very eccentric people are a bit autistic. It would explain why he seemed sensitive at some times and emotionally blind at others - I mean, you could _see_ that, just listening to him, the way it didn't occur to him to tell you that bit about the Secret-Keeper straight off but let you think he wouldn't tell you, which he ought to have known would stress you, but evidently he didn't.

"It would explain why he couldn't understand you in particular even though he loved you - yes he did - does, I think. He probably used Legilimency to cover up for not being able to interpret normal social clues, but when he didn't have a chance to read the person - or just couldn't do it, as the case was with you - then he was lost." Finding herself standing by his desk, she absent-mindedly picked up a metal ruler which she supposed he used for underlining, and began to tap it against the palm of her hand.

"_You_ read me" he said tightly.

"Yes, but I cheat." When there was no answer, she looked up and saw him watching the movement of the ruler as if hypnotized, his face going decidedly green around the edges. She froze, the metal strip poised stationery in mid-air, and he stood swaying for a second or two and then made a small noise in the back of his throat, lunged for the sink and was miserably and noisily sick.

Lynsey dropped the ruler with a clatter and went to stand beside him, laying her hand lightly on his bowed back. "Pet?" she said uncertainly.

He stood with his head bowed and his hands gripping the edge of the sink, and refused to look at her. "They hit - palms my hands," he said gratingly, "with a metal edge, until the bones broke."

She took him by the wrist, raised his left hand from the edge of the sink and kissed the narrow palm gently. "I saw how they'd broken some of your fingers," she murmured.

To her surprise he shook his head. "N-no, not - then. Before. With the Aurors."

"Oh, pet."

He laughed, a horrible sound, and drew his wand to banish the mess in the sink with an irritable flick. "Safety precaution: it guaranteed that I couldn't hold a wand to defend myself, even if I'd managed to get one off them. I hadn't thought much about it for years." He gave a shrug which failed miserably to be nonchalant, and let her take him by the shoulders, turn him and draw him into her embrace. "You can see why I - why I said I was tired of being hurt," he said thickly, resting his narrow face against her shoulder.

"Shh." She stroked his hair. "No-one's going to hurt you tonight: quite the reverse, if you want it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Oh, damn, I didn't - didn't really want you to stop just - feeling a bit - intense..." Shivers chased across his skin as he lay sprawled crosswise across the bed, panting. "I'm still not used to being touched - like that - without it hurting."

"Would it help if you had a Safe Word, like S&M people use?"

"It might do if I knew what a Safe Word was" he replied rather haughtily, trying to hang on to an appearance of dignity which assorted oddly with his current position, splayed out on his back sweaty and aroused and tangled up in sheets.

"Well, um, people who do that sort of, of play-acting sex, they might tell their partner to stop and not really mean it, because they were only playing at wanting them to stop, or because they sort-of play-pretend really wanted them to stop but really didn't, so they set up a code-word or phrase in advance - something bizarre which they would never say by accident, that they can use if they really _really_ want their partner to stop. And they know if they use it their partner will stop, so they feel, um, safe, even when they get a bit - overloaded."

"How about 'Potter is God'? That's something I'd certainly never say by accident..."

"This is true." She smiled at him and trailed her fingers delicately over a sensitive spot, making him gasp and jump. "I've never slept - or not slept, as the case may be - in a four-poster before. I like it. It extends that sort of, um, sense of privacy and safety that you have under the bedclothes into a larger arena, in which we can be as uninhibited as we like."

"You speak for yourself." He gazed up at her out of dark, serious eyes which glinted in the diffuse wand-light. "It's not easy to be - uninhibited when I know that you can... see me. You know. I might have been less - _inhibited_ in darkness."

"But I want to see you." She bent her head briefly to plant a delicate kiss in a spot which made his hips jerk convulsively. "When I look at your body, I see something fine, attractive, not anything you need be embarrassed about."

"Well - the same, then," he said awkwardly, reaching up to brush her hair lightly off her face and tuck it behind her ear, then gave her a rather crooked smile. "But personally I've always found sleeping with the curtains completely closed a bit - worrying. One never knows what might be lurking on the other side."

"Don't tell me - let me guess." She moved her thumb experimentally, a slow circling stroking across velvet skin. "You watched _Psycho_ at an impressionable age."

"Yesbutthatisn'tthepoint - ah! - no, don't stop. I grew up in the shadow of the Moors Murders so that sort of thing - people coming after you with a knife - that was _real_, and then, then you were sleeping in your bed in the dorm with the curtains drawn and you didn't know that the other boys - the other boys were just on the far side of the cloth, waiting to pounce on you with some stupid bloody vicious prank and then, then Ronald Weasley waking up to find Sirius bloody Black slashing the drapes with a knife was just - ah! - just reinforced it."

"Do you want me to open the curtains, then?"

"Maybe later..." He grinned at her suddenly, arching his back and pressing up against her hand. "I don't fancy an audience: let the house elves find their _own_ bloody amusements."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

She hooked her heel behind his thigh to draw him deeper in as his strong hands splayed against her back and they rocked together, gasping, his hair forming its own dark curtain around both their faces as she watched him, watched the delicate frown of concentration between his brows, felt the tremor in his breath and his surging back and forth inside her, the yielding mattress swaying under them until she felt like a boat on water, her own peak come and spent while he struggled to find the courage to let go, to yield to the moment. He made a thick indeterminate sound in his throat and stooped to kiss her, his mouth coming down over hers in what felt more like desperation than desire, and she wrapped her arms round him as they strove together and rubbed small firm circles in the small of his back, until he groaned aloud and heaved convulsively against her, inside her, finally, and the tense bitter lines of his face relaxed for a moment into unutterable peace.

Afterwards they lay quietly facing each other, her leg still hooked loosely across his and his long fingers lying gently across her breast. "Well," she said, and smiled at him.

"Yes." He gave her the flicker of a smile back. "I suppose I am - a man still, and I should be flattered that you chose to bestow your considerable charms on me, instead of laughing at my poor scar-ridden, scrawny carcass and - you know."

"You know I think you have a very nice bod and 'you know'."

He snorted at that and then rolled over onto his back with one arm behind his head, staring up at the dark ceiling. Lynsey eased over to lie close against him and kissed the point of his bony shoulder lightly. "I'm glad that you could - start to overcome the bad memories and replace them with nice ones."

Severus moved his head restlessly, so that he could look at her out of the side of his eye. "Don't get me wrong," he said with a sigh. "About - about being made to, to force myself on... That only happened three times, although you'll understand that three times was three times far too bloody many. But I often had to use - charms, and potions - because somebody it would be unwise to offend had taken some sort of shine to me at some bloody Death Eater social, and it was the only way I could manage." He turned and propped himself up on his elbow, so that he could look down at her directly, frowning. "Believe me, even when she's being what she thinks passes for _nice_, sex with Bellatrix is a deeply emasculating experience."

"Poor you," Lynsey said with a sympathetic shudder. "Having to grit your teeth and have sex - even voluntary sex - with someone you don't fancy is no nicer for a bloke than it is for a woman."

"I sold my own body for political advantage," he replied bitterly. "What does that make me?"

Lynsey reached up and patted his arm sleepily. "It makes you a spy, I think. Go to sleep now - you've to be up before dawn."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was too much to hope that he would sleep the night through when he had so much on his mind, even after a brisk bout of horizontal exercise. She gathered his sleeping form close, and he trembled violently in her arms as if he was being electrocuted which perhaps, in memory, he was. His eyes were wide open but unseeing. Stroking his hair back from his face, she began to sing to him quietly.

"On a field sable,  
Semée d'argent etoilles..."

The song was about future spacefarers, setting out into the star-studded darkness - but it was the gentle tune, not the words, which would reach him now.

"Like the field of a knight's device,  
Silver-scattered withal;  
On the field of a knight's device  
Ride our hopes,  
Ride our fears,  
Ride the dreams of us all."

The starlight glinted off the water, it glittered in his open eyes...

"...Calling challengers to the field:  
Sword and shield,  
Star and field,  
Ships that sail with the night."

Slowly, awareness gathered behind his dark gaze and he relaxed peacefully into her hold, dreaming on the music.

"...Gift of arms, and the vigil ends:  
On that field  
Darkness yields;  
Rockets flare once again."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Mufti is civilian, layman's or non-work clothing, especially the home-wear of somebody who wears a uniform when at work. Sub fusc, from the Latin for "beneath black", may be applied to any very sober, drab outfit but properly refers to the clothing traditionally worn by Oxford University students on formal occasions, beneath their black gowns. For men it consists of a white shirt, black shoes, dark suit and white bow-tie; for women a white blouse, black shoes, black skirt worn with tights and a black ribbon around the neck. Basically Tonks is saying that even when Snape has the opportunity to dress down, he still looks as sober and formal as if he was at work, and still dresses the way he would expect to dress under his academic robes.

There is a slightly artificial "traditional" style of Welsh women's dress, established in the 19th Century, which involves high black hats with wide brims.

Rosslyn Chapel is a small, late-Mediaeval church just south of Edinburgh, built by the Sinclair family, made of white stone and famous for its supposed Templar connections. It was going to be one arm of a cruciform cathedral, if the family hadn't run out of cash and impetus, and hence is fantastically buttressed and elaborate for such a small rural church. It is covered all over in decorative carvings which are said to be some of the finest examples of the stone-mason's art anywhere in the world, but to me it always looks slightly manic.

_Blake's Seven_ was a British science fiction series which was on the BBC during the 1980s.

Benoît Mandelbrot is a mathematician who is the father of modern fractal theory, which, loosely, examines shapes in which similar patterns are repeated at both small and large scales - as seen, for example, in mountains which are made up of lesser peaks which are made up of spires which are made up of rock faces which are made up of boulders and so on, each level being approximately similar in shape and texture to the level above it scaled down and the level below it scaled up. A Mandelbrot set is a particular set of mathematical equations which generate an infinitely complex pattern from simple rules; I only very vaguely understand it myself but for present purposes it's enough to know that it can be used to generate an image of a complicated shape covered in little curly, frilly bits which ascend and descend the scale in similar-looking stages.

"Totty" is a slang term for an attractive girl, probably one that one of the speakers has a relationship with, or hopes to - similar to "arm candy" or "bit of stuff".

The staff-room gargoyles, whom we meet briefly in OotP and again in DH, talk like Frankie Howerd, or like one of a number of other famously camp gay British comedy stars. This is very unlikely to be an accident.

Cullen skink is a peculiarly Scottish soup involving smoked haddock, potato and onion.

The description given in GoF says that Godric's sword is silver, but silver, even as an alloy, is too heavy and soft to make a sensible sword. I assumed originally that it was merely decorated with silver, but in _Deathly Hallows_ we're told that it is "goblin silver". That could be some strange, lightweight, hard silver alloy, but my best guess would be that goblin silver is actually titanium.

The idea that the Chocolate Frog Cards might be used as a portable version of Albus's portrait was inspired by a story called _Tormented Flesh_ by **yncarn8**. The idea that Albus's apparent omniscience might have been partly the result of using the Chocolate Frog Cards as a surveillance device is so far as I know wholly my own.

_Folie à deux_ occurs when one of two friends is mentally ill, and the nominally saner friend becomes caught up in their delusions and starts to show similar symptoms.

The Alfred Hitchcock film _Psycho_ famously shows a murder victim being stabbed through a shower curtain.

The Moors Murderers were paedophile serial killers who preyed on children in the early to mid 1960s, in the area just south of Manchester where Spinner's End is probably situated.

The song with which the chapter concludes is a filk (SF-based folk) song called _Blazon_, by Clif Flynt. The first (and last) verse describes the night sky in the antique French language used in formal heraldry, and begins "On a black background, scattered with silver stars..."

In the light of revelations in _Deathly Hallows_, the conversation between Severus and Albus has been substantially re-written, to show Albus as rather colder and to address both his willingness to send Harry to his death, and his cruelty towards Severus at the time of Lily's death.

The idea that Albus was concerned about Sirius's mental health and his difficult background, rather than especially fond of him, is I think supported by canon. As soon as the Potters were killed, and before there was any suspicion that Sirius was a traitor, Albus had already cut Sirius out of any part in deciding Harry's fate, by sending Hagrid to take Harry to the Dursleys without consulting Sirius. He seems to have accepted Sirius's guilt without question, until he found out that Peter was still alive, and later on he continued to give Sirius little or no say in Harry's upbringing, and could hardly find a good word to say about the man even when he was less than an hour dead.

On the other hand, he speaks of Snape with constant if slightly exasperated affection, and he twice refers to Snape's decision to quit the Death Eaters and work for the Order as his "rejoining" or "returning to" the anti-Voldemort party, suggesting that he'd had him pegged as naturally one of the Good Guys from the outset.


	17. Revision Table

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**REVISION TABLE**

Apologies to readers who are waiting eagerly for a new chapter, because this isn't it. What this is, is a summary of the changes which have been made to _Mood Music_ and _Sons of Prophecy_ in order to bring them in line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_ - although obviously they are AU from the canon timeline, branching off a few weeks before Dumbledore's death, when Percy Weasley spotted the fact that several Ministry officials were under Imperius.

The re-edits were uploaded on 17th August 2007, so anybody who began reading these stories after that date has already read the edited versions, and should skip to the next chapter. The changes are, for the most part, minor, which is why I have presented them in this summary form, so readers don't have to re-read both stories in their entirety just to find out what's different (unless they really want to, of course). However, the conversation between Severus and Albus in Chapter #15 of _Sons of Prophecy_ has been substantially re-written, to the point that it's probably better just to re-read that whole scene, including Lynsey and Severus's comments on it afterwards.

I have not bothered to note down tiny changes such as capitalizing "Horcrux", and making a few minor tweaks to phrasing. But note that although I haven't listed every individual instance here, both stories have been edited throughout to have Severus, Remus and Minerva all usually referring to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", since we have now seen that Severus calls him "Dumbledore" even in private.

Having completed the revisions to these solo stories by **whitehound**, I will now beetle off and try to do the same for the story _Lost and Found_, which I co-author with **Dyce** under the pen-name **Borolin**. That will probably take a week or two, and when that's done we can get back to actually writing and updating these stories.

* * *

**_MOOD MUSIC_**

* * *

**1: GOING UNDERGROUND**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** It was a snake - a hamadryad, she thought, and quite a large one, maybe ten or twelve foot long. She nodded to it, polite but uneasy: she had always rather liked snakes, but had no desire to become intimate with one as venomous and short-tempered as a king cobra.

**_New:_** It was a snake - some sort of thick-bodied viper, maybe a chain viper she thought, but unnaturally large: a good twelve foot long, as big as a small king cobra. She nodded to it, polite but uneasy: she had always rather liked snakes, but had no desire to become intimate with one as venomous, muscular and agile as a _Daboia_.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_Old:_** We are told that Nagini has a triangular head, so she isn't a python or a boa; the head-shape suggests a cobra or an asp, and the name Nagini is almost the same as Nagaina, the female cobra in Kipling's story _Rikki-Tikkii-Tavi_. _Ergo_, I assume she is a cobra. To be that big, she would have to be a king cobra. Strictly speaking a king cobra has a pattern of solid blocks rather than diamonds down its back (as we are told Nagini has), but they could be diamond-shaped blocks. All the snakes I can think of that really have a diamond pattern are either much too small, or they are pythons or boas and have a long head like an earless bull-terrier. So I am sticking with the assumption that she's a king cobra.

I know "hamadryad" sounds like a mythical beastie - and indeed it is the name of a Greek wood-spirit - but it is also a proper alternate name for the king cobra. Hamadryads have been recorded up to 24ft long - so Nagini isn't actually all that enormous. A 12ft cobra would have a head about as big as the palm of your hand. I don't believe any 12ft snake would be strong enough to break someone's ribs just with its bite (although a python could do so with its coils), nor could you feed a person to a snake that size - although it might manage an arm. So I assume that when Nagini attacks Arthur Weasley, and when Voldemort feeds people to her, he uses an Engorgement Charm on her.

**_New:_** We are told that Nagini is venomous and has a triangular head, so she isn't a python or a boa. The head-shape suggests a cobra or a viper, and because the name Nagini is almost the same as Nagaina, the female cobra in Kipling's story _Rikki-Tikki-Tavi_, I originally assumed she was a king cobra. However, the description in _Deathly Hallows_ of how thick her neck is, combined with the fact that her venom keeps both Arthur's and Snape's wounds bleeding, has caused me to change my mind and make her a thick-bodied viper, probably _Daboia russelii_, the chain or Russell's viper. This means, however, that at twelve-foot plus (according to the first chapter of GoF) she is three times the size of a normal adult chain viper.

Even so, I would assume that when Voldemort feeds people to her, he uses an Engorgement Charm on her to make her even bigger. Indeed we see this in Bathilda's cottage, where Nagini forms multiple coils from floor to ceiling, and hence must be about 60ft long at that point.

* * *

**2: THE POTENCY OF CHEAP MUSIC**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** they must have come a mile or more.

**_New:_** they must have covered almost a mile by roundabout routes.

* * *

**3: FLYING BLIND**

**Story text:**

_**Old:**_ "Lynsey O'Connor, forty-two, five feet eight..."

**_New: _**"Lynsey O'Connor, forty-one, five feet eight..."

**

****-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

Since _Deathly Hallows_ makes Snape a year younger than the evidence in OotP suggested, I have also reduced Lynsey's age from forty-two to forty-one, to preserve the gap between them.

* * *

**4: THE CRY OF THE DEER**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "The snivelling little psycho."

"Yes... He wants to devour death itself, so He can live forever."

**_New:_** "The snivelling little psycho."

The professor's mouth tightened at her words as if he had bitten into something unpleasant. "Yes... He wants to devour death itself, so He can live forever."

* * *

**5: SNARES FOR THE WARY**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** there was a sparkle of clean silver light against the backdrop of the mist,

**_New:_** there was a sparkle of clean silver light against the backdrop of the mist, a wavering outline of a slender-legged deer,

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "All of which is all very well and good if you have a talent for positive feeling. My Patronus has always been weak and irregular of form, precisely because there is nothing in my life which makes me feel safe, and never has been. In my line of work, I'd need to be mentally defective to feel safe. And nothing on earth makes me feel 'hope and happiness and a desire to live.' That's what the textbooks say you need to cast a strong Patronus: 'Hope and happiness and a desire to bloody-well live.'"

**_New:_** "All of which is all very well and good if you have a talent for positive feeling. My Patronus - my Patronus isn't really _my_ Patronus, it's a copy of the one that belonged to a friend who - who died. I've never had one that was truly mine, precisely because there is nothing in my life which makes me feel safe, and never has been. In my line of work, I'd need to be mentally defective to feel safe.

"All the happy memories I have are connected to - to the friend whose Patronus I copied but I can't infuse it with any sense of joy or of safety because she _died_. There's as much pain in it as happiness, so I can use it as a messenger but in the face of a Dementor it just - I just see her death. Repeatedly. Nor will it protect me, since she... I rejected her protection, in life, and she - withdrew it. And nothing on earth makes me feel 'hope and happiness and a desire to live.' That's what the textbooks say you need to cast a strong Patronus: 'Hope and happiness and a desire to bloody-well live.'"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I _think_ you could make the power-beast be your Patronus."

**_New:_** "I _think_ you could make the power-beast be your Patronus. And I don't think it would stop you from still having your friend's Patronus as well, when you wanted to call it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional second paragraph):_** I've also cheated a bit over the descriptions of the ichthyosaur and the pool. In reality, I believe only part of the pelvis of the ichthyosaur is visible (and some sources insist it isn't really a fossil at all but just a flint which looks like a fossil), and the pool has dried out.

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter had been altered slightly to bring it in line with the new canon background revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Originally, I had Snape unable to produce a corporeal Patronus at all.

* * *

**6: FLYTING**

**Author's note:**

**_Old:_** The only real possibility I know of in Yorkshire would be Bradford

**_New:_** The only real possibilities I know of in Yorkshire would be Huddersfield or Bradford, which were still quite run-down in the 1990s

* * *

**7: PSYCHO LOGICAL WARFARE**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "You left the Death Eaters partly because you were growing afraid of your own capacity for violence"

**_New:_** "You left the Death Eaters partly because you had realized your friend was in danger, but also because you were growing afraid of your own capacity for violence"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I _would_ have: and I've killed many times since, to keep my cover."

**_New:_** "I _would_ have: and I've killed since, if not by my own hand then by the information which I revealed, to keep my cover."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** it must be the having of magic that was the dominant gene.

**_New:_** it must be the having of magic that was the dominant gene. Unless there were two genes, both recessive, one for magic and one epistatic gene which masked magic, so that many people who appeared to have no magic were nevertheless homozygous for it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I won't even be thirty-nine until January"

**_New:_** "I won't even be thirty-eight until January"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been edited in several minor ways to conform with new canon from _Deathly Hallows_ and subsequent interviews. Apart from having Snape refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", and making him a year younger, I've edited his motives for quitting the Death Eaters in order to make Lily more prominent, made it ambiguous whether he had ever killed directly or not, even in the service of the Order, and added the possibility of an epistatic gene (one which masks the expression of a second gene, in the way that, for example, albinism masks what colour the animal would have been had it not been an albino) to Lynsey's thoughts about the genetics of magic.

* * *

**8: BURNER BE BURNED**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "a dirt-poor, working-class, three-parts Muggle twenty-two-year-old"

**_New:_** "a dirt-poor, working-class, three-parts Muggle twenty-one-year-old"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "To the best of my knowledge, the only person that ever actively liked me in my life before was Albus Dumbledore"

**_New:_** "To the best of my knowledge, apart from the - the childhood friend that died, the only person that ever actively liked me in my life before was Albus Dumbledore"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I've never been able to get close to anybody anyway."

**_New:_** "I've never been able to get close to anybody since Lily anyway."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** as the great hamadryad made up its mind and lunged towards her the professor spun on his heal and shouted something and she fell back, she fell back with the cobra's teeth embedded in her arm

**_New:_** as the great serpent made up its mind and lunged towards her the professor spun on his heel and shouted something and she fell back, she fell back with the viper's teeth embedded in her arm

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** As the cobra seeped away into darkness

**_New:_** As the viper seeped away into darkness

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Albus almost lost the use of his right hand because of it."

**_New:_** "Dumbledore almost lost the use of his right hand because of it, and could have lost his life."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I stood by and watched while He killed a man I owed my life to and a woman I - had cared about,"

**_New:_** "I stood by and watched while He killed a man I owed my life to and a woman I - cared about more than life,"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** Minor alterations have been made to this chapter, to bring it into line with the new canon backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Nagini has been changed from a cobra to a viper, Snape has been made to refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", his age has dropped by a year and he now says that he has never had a friend since Lily, rather than that he has never had a close friend at all.

* * *

**9: THE HUNT IN THE DARK**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** there was at least fifteen feet of chalk

**_New:_** there was at least fifty feet of chalk

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "My first fully-developed Patronus!"

**_New:_** "My first fully-developed and _Dementor-proof_ Patronus!"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Believe it."

**_New:_** "Believe it. Not that - well, I wouldn't want to lose the first Patronus, the one that was hers, but it's good to have an alternative which is truly mine and which actually can protect me, without the - unhappy associations."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** A few extra comments have been added to the conversation about the Patronus, to bring it in line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_.

* * *

**10: IMAGINARY MONGOOSE**

No changes.

* * *

**11: NIGHT FLIGHT**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** about twenty feet above them

**_New:_** about fifty feet above them

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Magic leaves a trace, so if we just go the one way they'll be able to track us - "

**_New:_** "Ordinarily they say you can't trace Apparition but _He_ can do a lot of things that 'they' say you can't do. If we just go the one way I'm afraid they'll be able to track us - "

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** - which wasn't a lie, as such.

**_New:_** - which wasn't a lie, as such - and to arrange for her neighbours to continue feeding her cats.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** He was spellbound not to give away the address, and no-one could even see the house who had not been told of its whereabouts by a designated Secret Keeper: but if he had been a traitor he could certainly have arranged for the Death Eaters to watch the square which the house seemingly stood on, and pick off visitors.

**_New:_** The _Fidelius_ spell theoretically kept the place hidden from anyone who had not been told of its whereabouts by a designated Secret Keeper, but _Fidelius_ could be cast in several different ways, and Dumbledore had never really been clear about which method he had used. The Order might think the professor was now free to reveal the secret, since Dumbledore's death: and in any case if he _had_ been a traitor he could certainly have arranged for the Death Eaters to watch the square which the house seemingly stood on, and pick off visitors.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional fourth paragraph):_** This chapter has been revised to bring it in line with the new background revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, which affects the parts dealing with the operation of the _Fidelius_ (a horrible fudge, but no worse than Rowling's own horrible fudge) and the tracking of Apparition. I am assuming that main time-line Snape didn't learn to fly until some time during his Headmastership, so this Snape has never acquired the knack.

* * *

**12: UNSAFE HARBOUR**

No changes.

* * *

**13: FOUR-PART DISHARMONY**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "He begged me - with his thoughts - to kill him and save myself, because he thought I was more valuable to the Order."

**_New:_** "He begged me - with his thoughts - to kill him and save myself, because he thought that he would die soon anyway, and so I was more valuable to the Order."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "You saw his hand: you must have at least some inkling of what he was prepared to risk on behalf of the Order."

**_New:_** "You saw his hand: you must have at least some inkling of how sick he was."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Don't be more stupid than you can help. I could no more kill Albus than you could kill those two fools you run around with."

**_New:_** "I was supposed to kill him for four reasons - to make sure his wand came to me, to protect Draco from having to kill him, to save myself from the Vow and because he was dying anyway. But the curse on his hand didn't seem to be progressing as fast as we had feared, the wand was gone already and I could save myself and Draco just as well by faking his death as by killing him - and I was damned if I was going to kill him when it wasn't even necessary."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I told him I would not do it, that my decision was final"

**_New:_** "I told him Riddle had never managed to make an executioner of me and I was damned if I was going to be one for _him_"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Where was his wand in all of this?"

**_New:_** "Where was his wand in all of this? It certainly wasn't with him on the tower."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "did anybody _find_ his wand?"

"Um - not that I know of."

**_New:_** "did anybody _find_ his wand?"

"Um - yes, but not until the next day. It was buried with him."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "But if you didn't kill Albus - where is he? We all saw him cremated - or somebody cremated."

**_New:_** "But if you didn't kill Dumbledore - where is he? We all saw him entombed - or somebody entombed."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "When he was cremated the body was wrapped"

**_New:_** "When he was buried the body was wrapped"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I don't know if he told you this - I swore an Unbreakable Vow to help Draco Malfoy carry out some order of - of His, if Draco should fail. It - I thought I was being clever. I swore to watch over Draco and protect him in order to convince the Ugly Sisters to tell me what Draco's mission was, I pretended to a knowledge of the situation which I did not in fact have, and then they backed me into a corner where I had to swear to carry out his mission if he fumbled it, or multiply their suspicions a thousandfold. I only found out weeks later that I'd promised to kill Albus if Draco didn't."

**_New:_** "I don't know if he told you this, but I found out... I told Dumbledore that - Riddle - was likely to order Draco to assassinate him. He expected the curse on his hand to kill him within the year - although in the event it didn't progress as fast as we had thought - and he said that if it came to it I should be the one to kill him, to protect Draco's soul and give him a clean death, and I was to stay close to Draco and monitor his plans, ingratiate myself with him. I still hoped to - to find a way to save him, but when the Ugly Sisters asked me to swear an Unbreakable Vow to protect Draco I took it. I thought Dumbledore would be pleased I was following his orders so fucking faithfully. Then they backed me into a corner where I had to swear to carry out Draco's mission if he fumbled it, or multiply their suspicions a thousandfold. I knew by then what I was swearing to, but I couldn't bloody-well get out of it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "he already had a badly injured arm"

**_New:_** "he already had progressive curse-damage, even if it wasn't progressing quite as fast as we had feared,"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "he saved me again, because it was realizing what I had done which brought me to my senses and to Dumbledore's camp."

**_New:_** "he saved me again, because it was realizing what I had done, that I had to try to save all of you and not just Lily, which brought me to my senses and to Dumbledore's camp."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I find it hard to see him in that light:"

**_New:_** "I find it hard to see him in that light, especially since he never let the fact that he had saved my life put him off from continuing to persecute me _ad lib_:"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "We were sixteen years old."

**_New:_** "We were fifth years."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "But if you'd asked me even then if I seriously intended to kill them - no. I may have done more than my share of killing later, but it has never come easily to do so in cold blood: it was always something I had to nerve myself up to in advance and throw up over afterwards."

**_New:_** "But I didn't invent the damned spell, only perfected it, and if you'd asked me even then if I seriously intended to kill them - no. I've killed a few times since, to save my own life or someone else's, but never in cold blood, and never easily: it was always something I had to nerve myself up to in advance and throw up over afterwards."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "James even went behind Lily Evans' back to go on persecuting me even _after_ he had saved my bloody life."

**_New:_** "James even went behind Lily Evans' back to go on persecuting me even after he had started dating her."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Of course. I'd far rather be a bloody tiger than a bloody sacrificial lamb, any day."

**_New:_** "Of course. I'd far rather be a bloody tiger than a bloody sacrificial lamb, any day. Even so - he was nearly always the instigator, and I realize now that he used the damn' Map and the damn' Cloak to get me when he knew there were no teachers present. He wouldn't have been able to hide it from Lily if he hadn't picked the venue eighty percent of the time."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "a constant reminder that the bully who made my schooldays a protracted hell also got the girl."

**_New:_** "a constant reminder that the bully who made my schooldays a protracted hell also got the girl, and that it was largely my own damnable fault that they both died."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been edited to bring it in line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Apart from Snape saying "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", we now know that he had almost certainly never killed anybody in cold blood, if indeed he had ever killed at all; that he probably didn't invent Sectumsempra himself; that Dumbledore expected to die before the end of the year, knew well in advance about Draco's mission and had already floated the possibility of Snape killing him before the Spinner's End scene; and that James definitely went on bullying Severus in the most blatant manner even after saving his life.

* * *

**14: CONFLICTED RESOLUTION**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "He looks too like his bloody father: the mere sight of him makes me feel hot and humiliated"

**_New:_** "He looks too like his bloody father, and his eyes are too much like _hers_: the mere sight of him makes me feel hot and humiliated and eaten alive with guilt"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I took the worst memories of his father out of my head"

**_New:_** "I took the worst memories of his father and of the, the break-up with Lily out of my head"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "and his dislike of _me_ was palpable - scalding, almost. But I could look at him without feeling ill"

**_New:_** "and his dislike of _me_ was palpable - scalding, almost, especially to see it behind _her_ eyes. But at least I could look at him without feeling ill"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "His godfather, too, and poor Lily - and yet he counts their sacrifice for so little"

**_New:_** "His godfather, too, and Lily - Lily could have lived, she could have, but she gave her life to save him and yet he counts their sacrifice for so little"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "You didn't start teaching at Hogwarts until you were thirty - I was _twenty-two_. Thank God even the eldest were a year too young to have seen me stripped and publicly humiliated, but most of them knew somebody who had: and the top two years had all seen similar - incidents from my so-delightful schooldays."

**_New:_** "You didn't start teaching at Hogwarts until you were thirty-three - I was _twenty-one_. Some of the seventh years had actually seen me hung up by the heels, publicly stripped and forced to eat soap when they were in first year, and even the ones who hadn't seen it knew somebody who had. And even the fifth and sixth years had all seen similar - incidents from my so-delightful schooldays."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Whatever for, Minerva? Nobody helped me when I was being bullied"

**_New:_** "Whatever for, Minerva? If I tried to talk to Dumbledore about any difficulties I was having with work he hardly even bothered to look up, and as for coming to you - nobody helped me when I was being bullied"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "so far as I know Albus's affection for you never wavered"

**_New:_** "so far as I know Dumbledore's regard for you never wavered"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "He grew up with his mother chopping the heads off house-elves and hanging them on the wall! Torture was a sport, to them:"

**_New:_** "He grew up with his mother chopping the heads off house-elves and hanging them on the wall, and while I do not know whether that sprang from cruelty or a warped sentimentality, it certainly showed that they saw them as mere animals. To some of that house, torture was a sport:"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I may be almost twice your age, my lad, but he was more than twice mine"

**_New:_** "I may be almost twice your age, my lad, but he was nearly twice mine"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "And he was born pure-blood, purest of pure, in an age when that meant real authority: more, he was born powerful."

**_New:_** "His father's family were pure-blood, purest of pure, in an age when that meant real authority, and he himself was born both brilliant and powerful."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "James was fantastically jealous of another boy even looking at Lily Evans"

**_New:_** "James was fantastically jealous of another boy even looking at Lily Evans, let alone being madly in love with her"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Every time she so much as glanced at you you looked like a whippet with colic."

**_New:_** "Every time she so much as glanced at you you looked like a whippet with colic: it was obvious the friendship wasn't just platonic, at least on your side."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_Old:_** It is ambiguous whether Snape was born in 1959 or 1960. We know that he was in the same school year as Sirius Black, so his age depends on Sirius's age.

Sirius was arrested and sent to Azkaban at some point after the deaths of the Potters on 31**st** October 1981. He escaped from prison in August 1993, at which point he was said to have been in prison for twelve years. Clearly, it must have been a bit less than that - but for him to have been in jail even close to twelve years, he must have been arrested in autumn 1981, soon after the Potters' deaths - probably some time in early or mid November.

JKR has stated that Sirius was twenty-two when he was sent to Azkaban - that is, he was twenty-two in November 1981. There are then two possibilities. If his twenty-second birthday occurred between mid November 1980 and August 31**st** 1981, then he was born between mid November 1958 and August 31**st** 1959, Snape (who we know was born on 9**th** January) was born in 1959 and they went up to Hogwarts in 1970. If it occurred between September 1**st** 1981 and his arrest in November 1981, then he and Snape started at Hogwarts in 1971 and Snape was born in 1960.

Fanon tends to have them starting in 1971, but it's more likely Sirius's birthday fell in the nine-and-a-half months before September 1**st** rather than in the two-and-a-half months between 1**st** September and early to mid November (when he was arrested), and therefore that they started in 1970. In which case, Snape was born in 1959. JK has stated that Snape was thirty-five or thirty-six in _Goblet of Fire_, and a birth-date in 1959 would make him thirty-five at the beginning of the book and thirty-six at the end of it.

Lucius was forty-one in September 1995, so he presumably started at Hogwarts in 1965 and left in 1972 (unless his birthday falls in early September, in which case he could be a year younger - but this is statistically unlikely). The longest Lucius and Snape could possibly have overlapped for at school would have been three years, if Snape was born in 1959 and Lucius was born in early September 1954, and the least would be a year, if Snape was born in 1960 and Lucius was born earlier than September 1954.

We know from what he tells Umbridge that Snape started teaching at Hogwarts in 1981 (just before Harry's parents were killed). The horrible incident after the OWLs, which occurred when he was sixteen, must have been in 1975 or 1976 - most likely 1975. It is ambiguous in the book whether the audience for that nasty bit of humiliation consisted only of students who had just come out from exams or whether the junior years were also around - but since exams in British schools tend to finish at lunchtime it is quite likely that pupils of all ages witnessed the incident.

If Snape was born in 1959, which seems the most likely, then he started teaching when he was twenty-two. He overlapped Lucius at Hogwarts by two years (three years, if Lucius was born in early September), and when he started teaching, the fellow students who had (potentially) witnessed him being stripped by James when they themselves were First Years had just graduated and left. If he was born in 1960 then he started teaching when he was only twenty-one, he only overlapped Lucius by a year (two years, if Lucius was born in early September) at school, and when he started teaching, his Seventh Year students had been First Years in the year of his OWLs, and many of them would have seen what James did to him.

**_New:_** Evidence from OotP, and from JK Rowling's statements at interview, suggested that Snape was probably born in 1959 or 1958; but since we know (from JK's website) that he was born in January, and that he was in the same academic year as the Marauders, and _Deathly Hallows_ has definitely established that James was born in March 1960, we must conclude that Snape was born in January 1960 (and that Harry was wrong when he thought, in April 1996, that the bullying incident which he had seen in the Pensieve, and which happened in the June that Snape was sixteen, had been more than twenty years ago).

We know from what he tells Umbridge that Snape started teaching at Hogwarts in 1981 (just before Harry's parents were killed), at which point he would have been twenty-one. That means that he was only four years older than the first lot of seventh years he taught, and when he started teaching the fifth, sixth and seventh years had all actually been students with him, and would have been respectively first, second and third years when he was in seventh year.

It is ambiguous in the book whether the audience for his humiliation by the Marauders consisted only of students who had just come out from exams or whether the junior years were also around - but since exams in British schools tend to finish at lunchtime it is quite likely that pupils of all ages witnessed the incident. The students who were first years when he was a fifth year - and who may well have watched his humiliation - were seventh years when he started teaching.

Lucius incidentally was forty-one when he spoke to the Prophet in mid September 1995, so he was born somewhere between mid September 1953 and mid September 1954. The most he could have overlapped Snape by at school is two years, and that only if he was born in early September 1954. Since their connection was well-known enough for Sirius to call Snape Lucius's lapdog, I'm assuming they did overlap by two years.

JK Rowling said in interviews that she saw Dumbledore as about a hundred and fifty, but that doesn't fit what we're told in _Deathly Hallows_. In summer 1997 the Weasleys' Aunt Muriel, who is supposed to be a hundred and seven, says that she remembers the death of Albus's sister Ariana, which we know occurred when Albus was eighteen. She was old enough to be aware that she hadn't been aware Albus even had a sister, so she must have been at least five. So Albus would have been born no earlier than _circa_ 1877, and been no more than about a hundred and twenty when he died.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been adjusted to fit with the new canon backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Apart from having Snape and McGonagall refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", it's been adapted to have Snape put more emphasis on Lily's sacrifice than on James's, and to mention the fact that Harry has his mother's eyes as well as his father's face. Snape has been made a year younger, so that his first lot of seventh years had been at school with him when he was stripped. Dumbledore's "affection" has been changed to "regard" and there is a mention of Snape having tried to get pastoral/managerial support from Dumbledore and got none, as we saw in DH. Minerva is now aware that he and Lily were friends, as well as him fancying her madly.

* * *

**15: _LUPUS EST HOMO HOMINI_**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "that was even worse than being stripped."

**_New:_** "that was even worse than being stripped and then she, Lily, I was so desperate I lashed out at her and she wouldn't forgive me. She was the best thing I had, and she never bloody forgave me again."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "they were so unnerved by how - relentless you were in your retaliation"

**_New:_** "they were so incensed by your refusal to be suppressed"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "the years of concentrated cruelty that had brought me to that point were just - swept under the carpet."

**_New:_** "the years of concentrated cruelty that had brought me to that point were just - swept under the carpet. Along with the two and a half bloody years of further torture which followed it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "but the only way I could deal with that public shame"

**_New:_** "but I lost the only person I ever really cared about, because of you bloody lot, and the only way I could deal with that loss and that public shame"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "No," Lupin agreed gently. "I understand that publicly losing a fight was bad, even against long odds, and I know intellectually that humans have status-issues about being seen naked - but dignity of that sort really isn't a canine thing, and I could never really _feel_ why simply being stripped would make it so much more - emotionally destructive. Especially since I think most people were more impressed than not."

**_New:_** "No," Lupin agreed gently. "I understand that publicly losing a fight was bad, even against long odds, and I can see why being embarrassed in front of Lily made you lash out at her, I think - "

"_Do_ you? Do you understand how - fucking _terrified_ I was of what my own House would do to me, if I let myself be rescued by a Muggle-born Gryffindor? At least you bloody lot didn't know where I slept."

"Well - perhaps I didn't see, then, but I can certainly see that Lily... that having her dump you because of it was bad, and really that was mostly our fault. And I know intellectually that humans have status-issues about being seen naked - but dignity of that sort really isn't a canine thing, and I could never really _feel_ why simply being stripped would make it so much more - emotionally destructive. Especially since I think most people were more impressed than not."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "What happened to 'You were always honourable' all of a sudden? I never told _your_ bloody secret."

**_New:_** "What happened to 'You were always honourable' all of a sudden? I never told _your_ bloody secret. Christ! I let Lily drift away from me because she thought that I was trying to control her, to tell her whom she could or couldn't be friends with, because I gave my word not to tell her that her new friends included a bloody werewolf and a bloody would-be murderer."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional paragraph before the N.B.):_** This chapter has been slightly altered to bring it in line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. Apart from having Snape and Lupin refer to "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", this means that more emphasis has been placed on how the Shrieking Shack and underpants incidents impacted on Snape's relationship with Lily, and the dating of the Shrieking Shack incident has been moved back to the middle of fifth year, well before the underpants incident.

* * *

**_SONS OF PROPHECY_**

* * *

**THE STORY SO FAR**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** _he had a long fall and was already injured and poisoned_

**_New:_** _he had a long fall and was already both cursed and poisoned_

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (additional second paragraph):_** _Shortly before Dumbledore's death, Percy Weasley spotted that a Ministry official had been Imperiused and this caused Voldemort's plans to take over the Ministry, and Hogwarts, to fail. The Ministry's decision to close Hogwarts and use it as an administrative base further diverted the timeline from the one in _Deathly Hallows_, so that Snape never became Headmaster and Voldemort's forces remained in hiding._

* * *

**1: SILENCE IS PRONOUNCED**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** it was suspected that the Unnameable One had his own spies at the Ministry.

**_New:_** it was suspected that the Unnameable One had his own spies at the Ministry. A junior administrator named Weasley, the estranged son of the red-haired man who had been so pleasant to Snape, had actually spotted the fact that three senior officials had been acting under Imperius: but there was no guarantee that they were the only ones, or that there were no sincere, non-Imperiused Death Eaters lurking in the Ministerial woodwork.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** On the Friday that Snape was thirty-nine years old

**_New:_** On the Friday that Snape was thirty-eight years old

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly re-edited to bring it in line with the new _Deathly Hallows_ backstory. Snape has been made a year younger, and a mention has been added of Percy realizing that some Ministry officials were under Imperius, to explain why this timeline diverged from the main one.

* * *

**2: COUNSELS OF WAR**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** He could, as she knew from talking to the Weasleys, easily live another hundred years or even more

**_New:_** He could, as she knew from talking to the Weasleys, conceivably live another hundred years

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Sometimes he dreamed about things she was sure had really happened, although they had acquired a surreal intensity - about faceless guards

**_New:_** Sometimes he dreamed about things she was sure had really happened, although they had acquired a surreal intensity - about a woman, falling, her face impersonal ivory and her hair a flame; about faceless guards

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "'Mione too," Harry said cheerfully.

**_New:_** "'Mione too," Harry said cheerfully around a mouthful of battered haddock.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** Minor edits have been made to bring this chapter in line with the new _Deathly Hallows_ backstory. Snape's potential lifespan has been edited downwards from "easily" a hundred and thirty-eight-plus or more, to "conceivably" a hundred and thirty-eight, in the light of the revelation that Albus was between a hundred and fifteen and a hundred and twenty when he died, not a hundred and fifty as Rowling had previously stated in interviews (although she has implied that Aberforth will still be going strong in his mid hundred-and-thirties). Lily's death has been added into Snape's recurrent nightmares, since we now know how overwhelmingly important she was to him.

* * *

**3: UNCHARTERED WATERS**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** They [house-elves could not Apparate more than the traditional seven leagues at a time

**_New:_** Unless directly summoned by their master, they could not Apparate more than the traditional seven leagues at a time

* * *

**4: TALKING BACK**

No changes.

* * *

**5: OIL AND WATER**

No changes.

* * *

**6: AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "And failing that, Dennis Lovegood is eager to publish"

**_New:_** "And failing that, Xenophilius Lovegood is eager to publish"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** The name of Luna's dad has been changed to comply with the new canon backstory in _Deathly Hallows_.

* * *

**7: MANY HAPPY RETURNS**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "I left the Muggle world more than twenty years ago"

**_New:_** "I left the Muggle world almost twenty years ago"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** The time elapsed since Severus left the Muggle world has been reduced to comply with his age as given in _Deathly Hallows_.

* * *

**8: A SHORE THING**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "When I was - fifteen," he said carefully

**_New:_** "When I was - fourteen," he said carefully

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** Severus has been made a year younger when he heard the Minnie Ripperton song _Loving You_, to comply with his age as given in _Deathly Hallows_.

* * *

**9: PRESENT COMPANY ACCEPTED**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "The prophecy that killed Lily - James, too, and he was a shit, but he didn't deserve that."

**_New:_** "The prophecy that killed Lily - she was my friend, my friend since we were children, and I fucking killed her. James, too, and he was a shit, but he didn't deserve that."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_Old:_** That raises the question of why Voldemort interpreted it as he did - but he would have a much better idea than Snape of how many pairs of parents or prospective parents there were who had defied him three times. And for all we know he may have killed a few adult candidates, as well, and have fully intended to work his way round to the Longbottoms once the Potters were dealt with.

**_New:_** That raises the question of why Voldemort interpreted it as he did - but he would have a much better idea than Snape of how many pairs of parents or prospective parents there were who had defied him three times, and he would also know, through Peter, that Dumbledore thought the prophecy referred to a child, because he would know that families with children born that July were being given special protection. And for all we know he may have killed a few adult candidates, as well, and have fully intended to work his way round to the Longbottoms once the Potters were dealt with.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** In the light of the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, this chapter has been slightly edited to place more emphasis on Lily's death as a result of Snape relaying the prophecy.

* * *

**10: COMING TO GRIEF**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "The poison was too much for him - poisoned on Wednesday, dead on Saturday."

**_New:_** "The poison and the curse between them were too much for him - poisoned on Wednesday, dead on Saturday."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "It was indescribably ghastly."

**_New:_** "It was indescribably ghastly. And I - just before that - she was my friend, the only real friend I ever had I think, but I was so - angry and humiliated and so _scared_, so frightened of what Avery and that lot would do to me if I let myself be rescued by a Muggle-born, so scared of what Potter would do to her, too, if she didn't get out of the way and, and furious too because she looked as if part of her found it funny and I lashed out at her, I insulted her and she - I drove her away, she joined in with them and jeered at me too but I still thought she was - magnificent, and then she left me there. With them. I lost her, she was never my friend again because of it, and then they hung me up by my heels and stripped me, while I was still a bit... you know."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Wrong on both points, Potter, as per bloody usual. I went straight to Albus about it"

**_New:_** "Wrong on all points, Potter, as per bloody usual. I didn't invent the bloody thing, I didn't leave the book lying around, and I went straight to the Headmaster about it"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "He said that if he - if we couldn't find a solution"

**_New:_** "He said that if he - if we couldn't halt the curse on his hand, if we couldn't find a solution"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "swear it on Albus's grave"

**_New:_** "swear it on Lily's grave"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional eighth paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly edited on the light of the new canon in _Deathly Hallows_, to place more emphasis on the curse which Dumbledore suffered, to make Sectumsempra not Severus's own invention and to emphasize that the Pensieve/bullying incident was so terrible partly because it resulted in a break-up from Lily.

* * *

**11: POETIC LICENCE**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "I am not certain. The act of removing a Horcrux is dangerous enough for the witch or wizard performing the removal - as you saw from Albus's injuries which he sustained as a result of cleansing Marvolo Gaunt's ring."

**_New:_** "I am not certain. The act of removing a Horcrux can be dangerous even for the witch or wizard performing the removal - as you saw from Dumbledore's injuries which he sustained as a result of cleansing Marvolo Gaunt's ring. Admittedly it wasn't clear, in that case, whether the curse related to the Horcrux or to the ring itself - but since the locket was also so heavily defended..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "When I was in Azkaban... before, when I was twenty-two,"

**_New:_** "When I was in Azkaban... before, when I was twenty-one,"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** In the light of the new canon revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, this chapter has been re-edited to make Severus call Dumbledore "Dumbledore" rather than "Albus", to make Severus twenty-one rather than twenty-two when he was investigated by the Wizengamot, and to leave it open whether the curse on the Peverell ring belonged to the Horcrux or to the ring itself.

* * *

**12: MISTY WATERCOLOUR MEMORIES**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "And I can't tell you how glad I am that I didn't have to."

**_New:_** "And I can't tell you how glad I am that I didn't have to." She could feel her own mouth tightening at the surge of memory, the image of his desperate anguish, and tried to school her face into calmness. She could so easily have failed to save him - so easily have had to leave him there in misery and blood.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I always was attracted to the night - even before Fenrir Greyback decided that it would be funny to give me the disease to go with the name."

**_New:_** "I always was attracted to the night - and I suspect I would have been even if Fenrir Greyback hadn't decided that it would be funny to give me the disease to go with the name."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** There have been minor edits to this chapter, mainly to take account of the fact that Remus was very small when he was transformed and therefore probably wouldn't remember having already been attracted by the night, and to show Lynsey being plagued by memory.

* * *

**13: MEDICINE SONGS**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "My - so-called bloody 'Lord' knew the secret and took me in at His side"

**_New:_** "My - so-called bloody 'Lord' knew the secret and took me in at His back"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_Old:_** The plaintive song _500 Miles_ was sung by the American folk/pop band Peter, Paul & Mary on their first, eponymous album, released in 1962 when Severus was three and Lynsey five.

**_New:_** The plaintive song _500 Miles_ was sung by the American folk/pop band Peter, Paul & Mary on their first, eponymous album, released in 1962 when Severus was two and Lynsey five or six.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (additional sixth and seventh paragraphs):_** Admittedly the description of Voldemort coming to the Potters' house, as seen through his own viewpoint in _Deathly Hallows_, does not mention either a person accompanying him or any kind of spellwork. But we do not actually see whether anyone is behind him, and it seems unlikely he would have gone alone when he couldn't know that the Potters would be unarmed and unguarded. Dumbledore knew so much of what happened that night - enough to decide almost immediately, before he even sent Hagrid to rescue the child, that Harry needed to be placed with his mother's bloodline - that it strongly suggests he had an eye-witness. And Voldemort must have done something to turn Harry's intended death into a Horcrux.

Dumbledore said in HBP that he was sure Tom intended to make a Horcrux out of Harry's death, and it seems unlikely that he was wrong about that, because we know Tom _was_ intending to make another Horcrux - he later made Nagini into one - and the death of the prophesied vanquisher would be too significant a death to waste. It can't be enough just to kill somebody and, bingo, the nearest suitable object becomes a Horcrux, or it would happen all the time. It can't depend on something Tom was going to do after Harry's intended death, because if so he never got to do it, and Harry wouldn't have become a Horcrux. And he can't simply have set the process in motion before he came to the house and given it no further input, because in that case the Horcrux would have been created when he killed James or Lily. He must have done something after killing Lily and before attempting to kill Harry, to ensure that Harry's death would feed into the Horcrux - even though we don't see him do it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** I really don't know where the fragment "There are many gardens" comes from.

**_New:_** When I first wrote this, I really didn't know where the fragment "There are many gardens" came from. However, I managed to identify it some weeks later, after almost twenty years of searching. I had misremembered it, and therefore so did Severus - or perhaps the singer I/he heard on the radio had changed the words a little - for the chorus properly begins not "Monday to Friday", as I remembered it, but "For days' work and weeks' work". Its title is _To People Who Have Gardens_. The words are by the novelist and historian Agnes Mure MacKenzie of Stornoway and the tune is by Marion Macleod of Eigg. It was arranged for voice and piano by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser for her early 20th C collection _Songs of the Hebrides_. It must have been in Volume II, published in 1917, or in Volume III, published in 1921, because I own a copy of Volume I and it isn't in it.

* * *

**14: DAMAGED LIMITATIONS**

No changes.

* * *

**15: OLD SCHOOL TIES**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** the goblins treated him with the same cheerful disregard

**_New:_** the goblins treated him with the same blank disregard

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** polished and gleaming and chased with silver inlay

**_New:_** polished and gleaming, its metal neither steel nor silver but somewhere in between

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "In any case, the fact of the matter is that I could not tell her the truth of your position when there were others present who might be in Tom's employ,"

**_New:_** "In any case, the fact of the matter is that I could not tell her the truth of your position when there were others present who might be in Tom's employ, even if I had decided that it was safe to compromise your security by doing so,"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I can't tell you how glad I am for it," Albus replied soberly. "I am - so very sorry, that you should have suffered so much, and that I was not able to protect you from the Ministry at least. I had intended to inform Minerva and Alastor, at least, that if you killed me, or appeared to do so, you would be acting on my orders, but..."

"But you put it off until the last minute, as per bloody usual," Severus said wearily, "and then Draco's sudden access of efficiency upended your plans."

**_New:_** "I can't tell you how glad I am for it," Dumbledore replied soberly. "Please believe that I am truly sorry that you should have suffered so much, and that I was not able to protect you from the Ministry at least. As you know, I had intended to come to your office, obviously sick, and have you perform the final service in such a way that I would have appeared to have expired naturally. That there might be witnesses to my death was a thing I had not anticipated."

"But you just assumed the world and everyone in it would conform to your personal agenda, as per bloody usual," Severus said wearily, "and then Draco's sudden access of efficiency upended your plans."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "It's not your fault, old man. I chose my own battles."

**_New:_** "It's not really your fault, old man. I'd have chosen to fight Him, I think, even if you hadn't bullied me into it - at least, I tell myself so."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "There were reasons, as you know, why I thought it would be better if you knew about Harry's mission."

**_New:_** "There were reasons, as you know, why I thought it would be better if you knew about Harry's mission. Had Percy Weasley not headed Voldemort's plans for a takeover of the Ministry off at the pass, if it had still seemed likely that you would be appointed as my successor and that I would be able to continue to guide you through this portrait, then I would have told you far less. But fearing that the Ministry as it stood would not - forgive me - would not be likely to appoint a former Death Eater as Headmaster, and that the curse on the Defence position meant you were unlikely to continue just as a teacher, I knew that whatever I told you before my death would have to suffice, and it needed to be enough to enable you to assist Harry."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Ironic, under the circumstances - not that I hold your disobedience against you. Say to her - " he pursed his lips and produced a shrill, warbling cascade of sound - "and she will listen."

**_New:_** "Ironic, under the circumstances - not that I hold your disobedience against you. Say to her - " he pursed his lips and produced a shrill, warbling cascade of sound - "and she will listen. Had you seemed likely to succeed me as Headmaster, I would have retrieved them from her and left them where you could find them in any case."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Come now, Severus," the older man said sternly, peering down at them over the tops of his glasses. "If you had tried to defend me we would all have been lost, including myself and Harry - as I'm quite sure you know. And even if it were not so - there may have been times when I have had to be prepared to risk you, to keep Tom from destroying our world; but other things being equal, do you really think I would begrudge my own life to save yours?"

**_New:_** "Come now, Severus," the older man said sternly, peering down at them over the tops of his glasses. "If you had tried to defend me we would all have been lost, including myself and Harry - as I'm quite sure you know. And although the curse was progressing more slowly than we had feared, I would still probably not have lived long, especially without your skill to maintain me. I had so little life left in me, while you potentially have so much - quite apart from the tasks which I still needed you to perform, I did not begrudge giving up my few remaining months to preserve you, perhaps, for decades."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I happen to think that you are," Albus said firmly. "You know that I have always had the highest regard for you."

"_Do_ I?" the other snarled, snapping abruptly from shame to bitterness. "Nobody on the staff except Horace gave me the time of day when I was a student - you were all too wrapped up in dancing around bloody Black all the time."

**_New:_** "I happen to think that you are," Dumbledore said firmly. "You know that I have always held you in high regard."

"_Do_ I?" the other snarled, snapping abruptly from shame to bitterness. "I thought that I was - oh, what was it now? That I _disgusted_ you."

For a moment the old man's painted features looked surprised - frightened, even. "No I - I never said that. Or if I did, I never meant it."

"Liar! I was so - fucking - _frightened_ but I came to you and you told me I was disgusting anyway, because I had only asked Him to spare Lily and not all of them - as if I would have had any fucking chance of getting him to spare all of them. Lils was all I could save - I thought I could save - but you told me how much you despised me for it, and then asked me to pay you for saving them. As if I wouldn't have done anything - _anything_ - to put right what I'd done, just for the asking."

" And this could not have been addressed at any point during the last sixteen years, Severus? I really don't think that this is the time or place - "

"What other fucking time or place _is_ there? You tell me that!" He was breathing in rough gasps like an overridden horse, and Lynsey watched him anxiously and wondered about pneumonia and scarred lung tissue and relapses.

"I - " The image of Dumbledore stared down at him for a moment, frowning, and then abruptly turned his back. Lynsey saw Severus flinch at the apparent dismissal, his stark features bleak with pain, but the old man hunched his shoulders and said, without looking at them, "I think now that I was - overly harsh, especially in the light of your later services to the Order."

"My services as you call them didn't stop you from tormenting me with my own guilt after Lily died!"

"I... yes. In retrospect, I find myself somewhat in agreement. In my own defence, I reacted badly because I could see myself, my own mistakes, repeated in you, and so I perhaps blamed you unduly for faults which were more my own than yours."

"How could you - " Severus sounded honestly bewildered. "What did you ever have in common with the likes of me?"

The painted man turned his head so that he was looking back over his shoulder, visible in profile but meeting no-one's eye. "Only that I too had once let bad company, foolish political theories and the love of my own cleverness lead me into a situation which - which resulted in the death of my own sister. When I saw that you had done the same I assumed that you were - as selfish and stupidly self-absorbed as I had been; but having got to know you better I no longer believe that that was the case."

"I wish you had told me. Why now? If you had told me then it might have made me less - less destroyed by my own guilt. Why _now_?"

"Because now may be all the time we have left." The portrait sighed, a tiny exhalation, and turned back to face them. "Because I have reason to think that the redoubtable Ms Skeeter is hot on my trail, and I value your good opinion too highly to want you to learn first from her pen what you should have learned from me."

"Because you value it, or because you _need_ it?" Severus muttered, almost under his breath, and Lynsey was pleased that he had realized the difference and accepted that being liked, rather than simply useful, was a thing which could potentially apply to himself. "Nobody on the staff except Horace gave me the time of day when I was a student - you were all too wrapped up in dancing around bloody Black all the time."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Please believe me that if I had known the extent to which he and Sirius were harassing you I would have asked Minerva to intervene. I knew James had an Invisibility Cloak, of course, but I didn't know he was using it to stalk you,"

**_New:_** "Please believe me that if I had known the extent to which he and Sirius were harassing you I would have asked Minerva to intervene, but to my sorrow I thought that you were - well - exaggerating matters, on those few occasions when you did complain. It seemed improbable that they would be able to do the things you alleged, and yet not be caught by any staff. I didn't know that James had an Invisibility Cloak, of course, let alone that he was using it to stalk you,"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I never had any doubts about your character"

**_New:_** "I never had any serious doubts about your character"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I always thought that you would someday be... an asset to those of us who opposed Tom."

**_New:_** "I always thought that you would someday be... an asset to those of us who opposed Tom. That was possibly why I was... perhaps harder on you than I should have been, later."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I think you may win because of what you choose to call your betrayal. It seems to me that the likelihood that Tom will now make another Horcrux"

**_New:_** "I think you may win because of what you choose to call your betrayal. It wasn't how I myself had planned matters, but it seems to me that the likelihood that Tom will now make another Horcrux"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "And Potter - Potter is afraid that he might be a living Horcrux himself, like Nagini."

"Yes."

"Yes he is, or yes he thinks he is?"

"Yes the idea had occurred to me. I hope that it is not so."

"So do I, believe me. He's asked me to kill him, if it comes to that, and I don't know if I can."

"For what it's worth, I do not believe that it will come to that. But I can hear him, and Minerva, waiting downstairs, so perhaps..."

"I always wondered how you knew - that people were downstairs, I mean."

**_New:_** "And Potter - Potter suspects that he might be a living Horcrux himself, like Nagini."

"You know that I have long suspected that this is in fact the case."

"He asked me to kill him, Dumbledore! He asked me to kill him, if it comes to that, and I don't know if I can, but better that than leave him for Riddle to kill. If - if it has to be."

"You still hope to find a solution which will enable him to survive, as you tried to do for me?"

"You know damned-well that I do," Severus answered roughly. "If - if there's truly no other way to bring Riddle down then I suppose... But I'm damned if I'm going to stand by and just let the bloody brat die, after all the years I've spent trying to keep him alive, without even trying to find another solution."

"I venture to doubt that you will succeed where I have failed," the older man replied somewhat frostily.

"Do you now?" the professor snarled. "And you are such an expert on the Dark Arts, of course, that no-one else could possibly know better?"

Dumbledore's portrait sighed. "If you can find a solution I have missed, so much the better - but I have reasons to believe that the boy must be killed by Voldemort himself, if he is to die. Because of the - nature of the link between them, it may be that Harry _can_ only die if he is killed by Voldemort - and if Harry cannot die, neither can the thing which I believe has lodged inside him. The fact that the Horcrux survived Harry's encounter with basilisk venom does suggest that it cannot die unless he does."

"If it must be, it must - but I refuse to just accept it until I have explored all the other options _myself_." He rubbed wearily at his eyes, blinking. "That was why you always favoured the brat, wasn't it? Because you knew that you were raising him for slaughter, and you felt _guilty_ about it."

"Severus..." The old man looked uneasy, even shifty, Lynsey thought.

"What?"

"Do not... seek to dissuade him. From being willing to die. There is a chance that - well, that if he is perfectly willing to die, the willingness itself may suffice. I do not wish to say more."

The professor gave him a long, thoughtful look, and then nodded abruptly. "Very well."

Albus Dumbledore inclined his painted head. "I hope that you are right, and that the situation can be resolved in a way which enables Harry and yourself Severus to survive. But I can hear him, and Minerva, waiting downstairs, so perhaps..."

"I always wondered how you knew," the younger man said restlessly. "That people were downstairs, I mean."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Very well: it would I admit please me still to be able to speak with all of you on a regular basis, so long as you remember that you, and Harry, and Minerva are the decision-makers now. There are fresh hands at the helm, that are not my hands, and I would not have it any other way. And Severus - "

**_New:_** "Very well: it would I admit please me still to be able to speak with all of you on a regular basis, so long as you do not use me as a prop for your own lack of confidence. Even I must acknowledge that there comes a time when there must be fresh hands at the helm, that are not my hands, and you have passed well beyond the limits of the plans which I laid down for you while I was alive. And Severus - "

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Take care of him for me. He is - very dear to me."

**_New:_** "Take care of him for me. I value him more highly than he believes, even if I haven't always shown it as I should."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "He seems genuinely fond of you."

**_New:_** "Do you think Harry really will have to sacrifice himself?" she asked sombrely. She had grown quite fond of the dark, intense young man with the roadkill haircut.

"Merlin, I hope not. Politics aside, I want to see Lily's killer destroyed, but to do so at the cost of her son's life is just - ghastly. I can understand the possible necessity, though I don't have to bloody like it: but I wish you could have heard how - cold Dumbledore was about it, the first time he told me. I used to think that he - that he loved the damned brat and that I was nothing to him in comparison: but now I wonder whether I should envy Potter his so-called love or pity him for it."

"He does seem fond of you, though, in his own peculiar way."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o--o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_Old:_** The description given in GoF says that Godric's sword is silver, but silver, even as an alloy, is too heavy and soft to make a sensible sword, so I'm assuming it is merely decorated with silver.

**_New:_** The description given in GoF says that Godric's sword is silver, but silver, even as an alloy, is too heavy and soft to make a sensible sword. I assumed originally that it was merely decorated with silver, but in _Deathly Hallows_ we're told that it is "goblin silver". That could be some strange, lightweight, hard silver alloy, but my best guess would be that goblin silver is actually titanium.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** In the light of revelations in _Deathly Hallows_, the conversation between Severus and Albus has been substantially re-written, to show Albus as rather colder and to address both his willingness to send Harry to his death, and his cruelty towards Severus at the time of Lily's death.


	18. 16 The Swimming Pool Library

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

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**16: THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY**  
((_In which wisdom comes from the deep, but water alone cannot wash away the past._))

Apologies for the long delay in updating, but I had to move house rather suddenly due to the death of my landlord, which occupied all my time for several months, plus **Loose Canon**, the Yahoo-based Potterverse discussion-group I mod, has been fantastically busy recently. Normal service should now be resumed I hope (not that normal service is all that fast).

Also profound apologies to people whose reviews I haven't answered, but at this point if I answered all the reviews I'd never get any actual story written. Now that things are back on a fairly even keel, I hope to be able to reply more reliably in future.

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She woke to find herself curled on her own in the deep hollow of the bed, and Severus emerging blearily from the bathroom in the washed-out early-morning light, roughly shaven and towelling his hair dry. He was still too thin, she thought, but not as desperately starved-looking as he had been when he first came to her flat. When he caught her watching him he glanced away from her gaze, from her breasts, flushing slightly and looking simultaneously embarrassed, sullen and smug - the more so when she grinned.

She scrabbled through a cursory shower herself in the shabby but clean bathroom. Eyelids at half mast, she accepted the cup of coffee and Danish pastry which he passed her in mutual silence and then followed him, yawning, out into the corridor.

"You don't have to do this, you know," he muttered as he led her down a dark tunnel where moisture oozed from walls of raw rock. "Just because _I_ have to be up at the crack of bloody dawn that doesn't mean you have to be."

"Wouldn't miss it," she murmured back. "I mean, mermen, come on, this is so... how could I look myself in the eye if I passed up a chance to see real mermen?"

"And what a fascinating image that does conjure up."

"Not half as fascinating an image as you being up at the crack of something," Lynsey replied. After a measurable pause to think it through she was rewarded by a flush which turned his still-stubbled jaw almost purple. But it really _was_ an enjoyable image. The thought of the previous evening made her insides glow and contract gently with imprinted sensation; the mind's-eye picture of him as she had seen him last night, lean-flanked, naked and aroused, made her dry-mouthed with lust and the memory of his bitter face softening into pleasure filled her with tenderness. She felt like making some grand gesture to demonstrate her vast fondness for him; but it was the small gestures which he needed, lots of them and for a long time.

They must be well below the water-line, she realised, moving through utter darkness by the soft dandelion-clock light of the professor's wand, as they had done before, and the floor under their feet was muffled with sand, the sound of their own breathing magnified and reflected back to them from all sides. But soon enough the floor of the tunnel began to rise, disgorging them at length onto an underground jetty where several small boats bobbed at their moorings. When she moved towards the boats, Severus drew her back and guided her down and across a skirt of white beach, until by craning right she could see a short way down the tunnel that led off into the thickness of the stone. Water half-filled it, still and black, but she had light enough to see a narrow stone path at the side of the water, and a faint glimmer where the channel curved from view.

Edging along the path, they rounded the curve of the tunnel and emerged through a curtain of ivy into - into the American national anthem, Lynsey thought fuzzily, into dawn's early light, although at least there were no rockets to trouble them. Harry was waiting for them on the shelf of rock at the foot of the cliff, yawning and blinking, the round glasses making him look like a day-struck owl. He was clutching a handful of some rubbery, seaweedy plant - at least, she hoped it was a plant, and not something's tentacles. Did seaweeds still count as plants, these days?

Severus gave a small, stiff nod to the boy, who returned it. The pink-grapefruit rim of the sun was just appearing over the mountains on the far side of the lake as the professor fished the conch-shell from the front of his robes, frowning, raised it to his lips and blew a long, brassy, reverberating note, like the death-cry of some vast prehistoric mammoth. A flight of ducks rose, booming, from the surface of the water; as their creaking mingled with the long dying-away of the conch, Harry raised the rubbery, wormlike stuff to his lips and began chewing furiously, his lips drawn back in disgust.

They stood there, waiting, quietly, watching a little breeze riffling the water and breaking the pink reflected path of the sun into rosy shards. Silently, suddenly, there was a - a _thing_, a - person looking at them through yellow eyes as slotted and inscrutable as a goat's, its bare chest rising smoothly from the dark water. Lynsey had to fight with herself not to step backwards and even so she could feel her shoulders jerk in fright. The other two appeared quite unconcerned. Harry nodded politely and swallowed the green weed in a convulsive gulp, and Severus just looked patiently weary as he pressed the heel of his hand to his breast and inclined his head in greeting to the - merman - yes, probably a man, at any rate there were no visible breasts, although no visible anything else either as far as Lynsey could see, and she supposed the merpeople kept any dangly bits folded up into a belly-slit, the way cetaceans did.

The merman opened a V-shaped jaw full of horribly sharp, jagged little teeth and said something interrogative in a high, skreaking, chittering voice like a dolphin's. Despite the mane of dark-green hair and the necklace of raw quartz, he was rather dolphin-like altogether, with his dove-grey skin and his pin teeth. Severus cleared his throat and said two or three shrill words which had to hurt him. The merman looked from one man to the other, curled his barely-there-at-all lip at Harry in an obviously derisory way, rolled over and back and disappeared shoulder-first. As he slid under the surface Lynsey glimpsed a sliver of tail, breaking through into air - it was silvery and smooth, but she saw no actual scales, and she thought that perhaps the merman was not a fish/man hybrid but, rather, a marine mammal which had evolved from a primate, as dolphins had evolved from some primitive ungulate.

Movement caught her eye and she realised that Harry was shucking out of his robes - and that there were the beginnings of gills sprouting out of his neck, which presumably were what had attracted the merman's scorn. As she watched, the young man kicked off the shoes from his rapidly elongating feet, and dived into the water with an easy athleticism which had Severus curling his lip worse than the merman.

"Bloody hell," Harry said, breaking the surface, "I'd forgotten how bloody _cold_ it was." He clutched at the stone shelf by their feet with webbed hands, and bobbed there with the water lapping at his ears.

"I could put a Warming Charm on your swimming trunks" Severus murmured, and Harry grinned at him.

"They're just my regular pants - anyway, I'm OK now. It's only cold at first, before the Gillyweed really gets going."

"At least this time you didn't need to steal it from my supplies" the professor said sourly.

"I didn't before, exactly, it -" He frowned, then spat as a ripple overran his lips. "It was Dobby, but you can't be mad at him now, because you owe him too much."

"Just one of the many debts I can never hope to repay," Severus replied bleakly.

"Umm - well, you can call the money I spent on you payment for the things I _did_ nick - if you like."

The sun was edging above the mountains, and Lynsey could make out the pine trees stretching up the high bank beyond the lake. She remembered, from seeing the view out of an upper-storey window, that there was a small train-station halfway up the slope, somewhere beyond the trees.

Suddenly, the professor sucked in his breath, so faintly that Lynsey would not have noticed if she had not been so attuned to him, and his chin jerked up. She looked where he was looking. Four spear-points were travelling in formation towards them above the surface of the lake, trailing streamers of green and black waterweed.

The honour-guard halted a little way out from the shore, fanning out as they did so. Severus knelt down on one knee, bowing his head, as the waters parted and a wild-looking woman wrapped in amber and jet rose up in front of them. She said something in the whistling dolphin-language, interrogative and sharp, and Severus answered her with a long ululation which Lynsey recognised from their conversation with Dumbledore's portrait. The Merchieftainess, for it was surely she, said something in reply and Severus shook his head in a self-deprecating way and muttered a few discrete sounds - Lynsey had the impression that he was probably saying that he spoke only a few words of the language.

Mercus inclined her fierce head and spoke again, a series of slow, spaced sounds, and Severus nodded. "Potter - go with the Merchieftainess. She will take you to the books, but you will need to use your wand to retrieve them. Impervius and a Bubble Charm should be sufficient."

Harry nodded and ducked beneath the water as the merwoman sank from view. Lynsey could only suppose he had his wand stuck through the waist of his underpants.

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As the bannered spears wheeled away from them and disappeared beneath the surface, Severus scrambled rather awkwardly to his feet, away from the cold water which was lapping at his knee and soaking his robe.

"How long d'you think he'll be?" Lynsey asked.

"Half an hour, perhaps?" He made a distracted, irritable little movement of the head. "I should have thought to bring a gift for the Merchieftainess - last night, I should have thought, but I was..."

"Your mind was on other things."

"You could say that." He sighed, looking down at his own hands; as solemn and archaic as a slightly damp monk, she thought, although marginally less celibate. "I was - pleasantly surprised. I -" He flushed slightly. "I was going to say, 'I didn't think I had it in me', but under the circumstances that might be a bit unfortunate or, um, the wrong way round..."

Lynsey grinned at him. "I'll surprise you pleasantly any time you like - and the only reason I can't say the same is because I _wasn't_ surprised. I had high expectations of you, and I wasn't disappointed."

"I endeavour to please - well actually I _don't_, generally speaking, but a change is as good as a rest, and I could bloody do with one, and I'm not going to bloody get it until - until the war ends, or I do."

"I wish you could have a break, pet," Lynsey said unhappily. "I know you can't, really, but I wish I could help."

"You do help." He leaned back against the rock wall and gazed out over the lake, not looking at her. "I was so... I still have the dreams, you know I do, but it's so much easier, having someone there, not having to go through it on my own, even though - even though I'm ashamed to have you see it."

"Oh, pish. I told you, you know I did, that seeing you - like that," she said, flinching before the memory of him as she had first seen him, hung up bloodied and crying as his shoulders tore out of their sockets, "it just made me see you as... well, as something precious that had been saved from a catastrophe."

"Like an unusual eighteenth century Staffordshire chamber-pot. But that - in the cave, what you saw - that was - was nothing, comparatively speaking. If you had seen what they - and how I -" He looked aside, letting his hair swing forwards like a curtain, and Lynsey threaded her fingers through his, raised their joined hands to her lips and kissed the back of his hand.

"Pet I - I did see, some of it. When you were taking your memories back out of the bowl I could see - see a lot of what you were seeing, I think."

He jerked back, pulling his hand out of her grasp, and stared at her wildly for a moment before a hard, closed look settled over his face. "And how do you know," he said coldly, "that this is not simply the product of your own vivid imagination?"

"I don't know," Lynsey admitted unhappily, "but it certainly felt real." She broke eye-contact and looked down, searching the jagged images for something which was unusual enough to be more than an unhappy guess, without being too mortifying for her to say or him to hear. "They - I saw - they hung you up, upside-down I mean and - as if you were trussed, and then spun you back and forth and somebody said - said 'Keep him awake, it's no good if he faints', and you were trying to be sick..."

"... only I had nothing in my stomach to be sick with," he finished softly, and the bleakness of his voice cut her like glass. She glanced back at him out of the corner of her eye and saw his mouth working queasily. "And did you see the rest of it?"

She wondered about lying, but instinct told her not to - and it was all very well trying to spare his feelings by not saying anything too embarrassing, but _he_ knew what had happened, after all: he had seen it fresh and from the outside only recently. "They used that - Crucio thing, while you were spinning, and" - she forced her voice to sound brisk although it wanted to be husky, her jaw was trying to lock with emotion but letting him know how difficult it was to say or to think about would only humiliate him - "you, um, wet yourself. I didn't see any more." He had spun, shrieking, with his hands bound tight to his thighs and his hair and his genitals hanging down, the shameful liquid spurting over his belly and chest as they fired question after question at him -

"It's hardly the image a man wants to present to a lover," the professor said bitterly, and a small, outlying area of Lynsey's consciousness jumped up and down and waved a flag at the choice of words, even though most of her awareness was taken up with sympathy.

"You've seen me pea-green and vomiting all over your shoes, practically, and you know you don't have to be embarrassed about me seeing your, um, bits - I _like_ your bits. They're very _nice_ bits." He snorted at that, and managed to look slightly as though he was preening himself, superimposed over all the anguish. "And you were - you were being very brave. You didn't tell them -"

"And a fat lot of bloody good that was, since I broke in the end anyway. I might as well have saved myself the effort."

"It was still a very brave attempt, even if - even if it didn't succeed, in the end. Probably nobody could have done better. And..." She frowned, watching the sunlight on the water, and searching for the right words, the ones that would mend him. "You say, 'If I had seen', as if - as if I'd recoil from you if I did but I _have_ seen, quite a lot of it, including some of the - um, sexual stuff." He sucked in his breath and she went on hastily, "Yes, but, the point is, I saw that weeks ago and it didn't put me off you or, um, stop me fancying you or make me think less of you or anything, any more than it did Filius it's just - just a thing that happened to you, like getting malaria or something, so you don't have to do this bloody stupid-arse 'Woe is me, if she realises what it was really like she'll be disgusted by me and Turn Against Me' thing, because I've _seen_ it - bits of it, anyway - and I'm not disgusted." She thought about that for a moment. "Well, not by you, anyway."

Still without looking straight at him, she slipped her fingers through his again, and this time he did not draw away, but gave her hand a gentle squeeze and swept his thumb across the back of her knuckles. "All right?" she said, and he gave her one of his sidelong, glittering looks, his long mouth quirking up at the corners.

"Very well."

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Having started on holding hands, there seemed no particular reason to stop, and their fingers were still interlocked when Harry's dark head broke the surface. He saw their joined hands and grinned, and Severus went slightly pink and assumed his most forbidding scowl, which only made Harry grin wider.

He drew up something which seemed to be encased in a shiny bubble of air, and pushed it out through the surface of the water, which slapped back into the empty bowl of the bubble as it passed. "It" was an oilskin bag resembling a good-sized school satchel, which Harry boosted up onto the ledge by the professor's feet. His fingers, Lynsey noticed, were still decidedly webbed.

"Are you coming out now?" she asked.

"Nah. _These_," he said, putting his hand up and touching the side of his neck below the water-line, where the pink roses of gills pulsed like a heartbeat, "last about an hour, so I might as well have a bit of a swim for, you know, recreation. While I'm here."

"Well, do try not to get eaten by anything, Potter, won't you."

Harry grinned again. "I'm going to try and pick up some really close up mental images of the giant squid, to send to Vol- sorry, to Heehoo, if he tries to mess with my mind."

"I suppose I shall have to wait and make sure the little fool really does get back safely," Severus muttered, hoisting the strap of the satchel over his shoulder as the pale underwater streak that was Harry sculled away from them.

"What's it like down there?" Lynsey asked. "I mean - the merpeople? Have you ever seen it?"

"Oh yes - when I was a student myself, and later when I was in my twenties and the students were on holiday I used sometimes to go for a swim, although you have to be careful of the, um, outfall from the bathrooms. There's a whole world down there, Lynsey - a good-sized village, two hundred houses, with gardens, crops, arts, a whole other culture, and yet most of the students aren't even curious about them. Too busy chasing a bloody shuttlecock."

"I wish I could see - but I can't swim."

"I'll teach you, if you like - but I don't think now would be a good time. They're not that keen on sightseers anyway, to be honest. But... I could show you my memory of it in the Pensieve some time. If you liked."

"Oh! That would be marvellous."

After settling Harry's clothes well above the water-line they climbed up the narrow flight of steps set into the cliff, down which Harry must have come, and found themselves at last on a path which ran between the castle and the cliff-edge, separated from the drop by a low wall. "Look," Severus said softly, and looking down, with the sun now well above the mountains, Lynsey thought that she could just make out a cluster of round huts, deep under the surface near the centre of the lake. As she watched, a vast shadow passed across the village.

"What the -?"

"Squid," Severus said succinctly.

"Ah."

She started to walk down the easy slope that led down to their right, fanning out into a green lawn at the edge of the water, dotted with bushes and trees. But Severus stayed where he was, and when she looked back at him his expression was one of grim distaste.

"What?" she said again, and he shook his head slightly.

"Nothing, it - nothing important, anyway. That was where Black and Potter Senior -"

"Ah."

They went the other way, down past the greenhouses to a sloping bank studded with rose-bushes. It wanted still some hours till breakfast, so they sat down quietly to make sure Harry came to no harm, insofar as that was possible. Severus opened the book-satchel and began to examine the contents, while Lynsey leant comfortably against his side. After a while, she went to sleep.

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When she woke, a soft haar was whitening the roses, the sun was well up in the sky and Severus and Harry were talking quietly.

"So - find anything useful in there?"

"Give me a chance, Potter," her professor said sourly; "there's a lot to get through, and some of these are - well, let's just say I'm lucky to still have all my fingers." His shoulder shifted against Lynsey's cheek, and she thought that he had probably rubbed his eyes. "This one though, _Secrets of the Darkest Art_ - I think there's enough information here to trace the spell, if we're lucky. And it looks as if Dumbledore was right - the more Horcruxes He makes, the more He weakens Himself."

"So even if he does make more because you - well, it's not disastrous, is it, because he'll weaken himself so we can contain him while we find the new ones."

"'Not disastrous' Potter so long as I can live with the knowledge that he has murdered again to make a fresh Horcrux - because of me."

"Yeah but - it's not like he was going to go and join a monastery and work for world peace and understanding or something if it wasn't for you, is it? He kills people anyway - it's just what he does afterwards that changes."

"I suppose. But denaturing the Horcruxes once they are made is - problematic. If this book is to be believed, only a weapon of exceptional destructive power can eliminate them." As Lynsey sat up and cranked her eyelids open he gave her the ghost of a smile and then looked down at his own hands, which were toying absently with the sycamore wand. "Dumbledore had a - a weapon which probably had sufficient power, but it is not currently available, and there are - special considerations."

"What weapon? Can we get it?"

"It -" He glanced at Lynsey, and a closed look came over his face. "Very probably not." She realised that the matter was one she must not know about, in case the snake-man some day caught her and ripped her mind. "In any case it will keep until later."

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After breakfast Severus disappeared for an hour, leaving Minerva, Filius and Pomona to organise the day's exercises. Lynsey suspected that he had gone to talk to Dumbledore's portrait about what he had mentioned to Harry. He came back looking grim and tired, but when she asked him if the meeting had gone well he shut his lips in a thin line, and she left well enough alone. Natural curiosity aside, she didn't want to know anything he didn't want her to know - she trusted him not to be wilfully secretive, unlike his erstwhile commander, and she knew that she would not hold out under torture anything like as long as he had done (spinning, shrieking, striving vainly to be sick...). If there was information being bandied about which it would be disastrous for the other side to learn, she didn't want to know about it.

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The exercise of the day, it had been decided, was Peeves-hunting. Peeves seemed quite happy to be hunted, since he nailed his pursuers nearly as often as they got him, and flitted from corridor to hall to stair like a malevolent helium balloon, blowing raspberries and worse things and hurling small breakable objects as competing teams of students thundered after him, snapping off shots at his bobbing, darting form and getting uproariously in each other's way. Poppy Pomfrey was kept busy, though there were as many skinned knees and ricked ankles as more magical injuries.

Severus maintained an air of superior disdain, drifting through the herd with a slight curl of the lip. Lynsey could have told him this was asking for trouble, and was not surprised when Peeves shot out of the open mouth of a roof-boss, cackling, and dumped a bucket of treacle over him. A lanky fourth year Ravenclaw in spectacles bolted round a corner and hit the poltergeist dead centre with a stream of ice-blue light which flattened him back against the wall and held him there, swearing, so that Severus was moved to exclaim "Shot!" in honest admiration.

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After lunch, Severus left Lynsey talking to Pomona Sprout, who was always keen to show off her collection of weird and magical plants to anyone who expressed an interest. Lynsey, who had always liked the glasshouses at Kew and at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, was fascinated. Many of Pomona's specimens were both ugly and dangerous but she loved the alienness of it all, the steam and heat and greenness trapped in a bubble of glass, circumscribed and disconnected from the cool Scottish spring outside.

She could have stayed all afternoon, but after an hour she went looking for Severus, sticking to routes she already knew and following the baying cries of the students. But when she rounded a corner to find him muttering to Harry, Hermione and Ron in a bubble of silence which rendered them inaudible from more than three feet away, and caught the words "... issues, to do with my Vow", she stepped back again out of range with a nod to Ron, and went to talk to Filius instead.

Not that that was reassuring either, for the little man looked grey and sad, and his cockatoo crest of hair was drooping. It was obvious that what he had seen in the Pensieve of Severus's suffering had left him deeply scarred, and she could not say that she was surprised.

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"... only wish there was more I could do," Filius was saying, when there was a bang like a firecracker and Lynsey looked up to see Severus and the Trio advancing towards them down the corridor, her professor's robes billowing about him and Peeves swooping overhead trailing ersatz sparklers and gunpowder, chanting "Ohhh, Potty and Snotty and Swotty and Spotty..."

"They're freckles, you arse," Ron cried indignantly, and Peeves turned a summersault, singing "Spotty dotty grotty Ginnnnger!" As Lynsey watched, the redhead raised his wand and shouted _"Langlock!"_ and the poltergeist made an inarticulate sound of fury, clapped his hand over his mouth and shot away. A distant cry of "Tallyho!" showed that one of the hunting parties had spotted him.

Severus raised his eyebrows. As he fell in beside Lynsey, he said sourly, "I see Potter wasn't the only one who thought my ideas worth stealing," and Lynsey recognised the hex which had silenced the tongues of the guards at Azkaban.

"'s'not stealing," Ron said earnestly. "'s'a tribute, see. You had some wicked ideas when you were at school - I'd have died if it wasn't for you."

"Yes, well," Severus muttered, looking desperately uncomfortable, "it's a pity that your admiration never actually extended to listening to me in class."

Ron scuffed the heel of his shoe along the ground, looking equally uncomfortable. "It's - you know - what we do, not paying attention n' stuff. Besides - I thought you sort-of enjoyed shouting at us."

"Enjoyed!" the older man exclaimed bitterly. "You don't know how bloody _soul-destroying_ it is, teaching a class who won't listen."

"I didn't find it as bad as all that," Harry said, "I mean, teaching the DA. Bit of a pain at times, but I wouldn't have said 'soul-destroying', not as such."

"But you were teaching students who actually wished to learn whereas I, for the most part, was not." He looked weary and outworn; Lynsey tried to catch his eye but his gaze was turned away from her and from everyone, seeing into the past. "Teaching Defence is one thing - most students can summon some interest in learning how to hex each other silly. But Potions requires precision and patience which hardly any student is willing to acquire, and attempting to teach them is..."

"It's not that bad, surely?" Harry replied uneasily.

Severus rounded on him. "Oh, just imagine, will you," he snapped, "how you'd feel if you were chasing the Snitch round the bloody field and the spectators were all talking amongst themselves and, and passing notes to their little pals and not one of the bleeders was paying you any attention. It's as if everything you've ever done, all your work, just counts for nothing."

"I - I'm sorry. I didn't think - "

"You astonish me."

They glowered at each other. Hermione cleared her throat and said, in a forcibly bright tone, "While we're here, sir, we really ought to retrieve your Potions book. Did you say you left it in the Room of Requirement, Harry?"

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Dinner was early, between five and six pm. The combatants had all worked up a good appetite and were cheerfully rowdy. Severus looked glum and kept pushing at his hair irritably, without realising he was doing it, but when his and Lynsey's hands collided as they both reached for the cranberry sauce, he gave her one of his flickering there-and-gone smiles and murmured "I suppose it would be asking for trouble to hold hands in front of such a large audience..."

After dinner they made their laborious way to the seventh floor, Lynsey trailing along behind feeling like a spare wheel. She supposed herself to be performing much the same function as a goat used to calm a nervous horse.

For part of the journey they went _via_ a narrow, concealed stair which started behind a tapestry on the second floor, and then mysteriously skipped a stage to emerge behind another tapestry on the fourth floor, jumping them through two storeys for only one storey's worth of steps. Lynsey wondered why they didn't just kit the place out with lifts, as at the Ministry, especially when they all had to jump and clamber to avoid a tread halfway up, which Severus warned her wasn't really there at all. She prodded it with her toe when he wasn't looking, and the apparently solid surface yielded like smoke. The suit of armour at the top of the stairs cackled something about Doubting Thomasina as she passed it.

There were a lot of suits of armour on their route - suits of armour, statues, paintings, decorative reliefs, all of them imbued with a disturbing liveliness. Rounding a corner, they walked first past a boys' bathroom, then a niche containing a man-high, dragon-shaped china vase which rattled its claws and hissed as they passed; beyond it an unusually empty length of corridor extended into the middle distance. On the left was nothing but a few widely-spaced windows with stretches of bare wall between them, looking down into the green grounds: on the right, facing the space between the vase and the first window, there hung a bizarre, badly-worn tapestry in which hulking, lumbering beings like humanized hippopotami cavorted in what looked like pink tutus. At first glance it resembled a scene from _Fantasia_ - at second glance, more like _Tom & Jerry_, for the dancers finished their pirouettes by beating a confused-looking wizard over the head with clubs. She wondered uneasily whether this was just a form of mildly interactive looped tape like the photographs in the _Daily Prophet_, or whether the carefully-stitched figure was conscious and suffering.

The coarse, pixellated effect of the enormous tapestry made the scene look more like a simple looped tape, but she was not a hundred percent convinced. What would happen to somebody who was painted undergoing torture or death by fire - would the portion of their soul that went into the image be condemned to an eternity of pain? She resolved firmly to make sure Severus would have a pleasant magical portrait after his death, kept in the hands of friends, so that if his enemies tried to use paint to trap part of his soul into torment he would always have a bolt-hole.

"I need the room where all the junk is" Harry said loudly to the empty wall opposite the tapestry, and he began to mooch up and down in front of it, looking vaguely sulky. Lynsey suspected that he was still unsure about showing this secret to a teacher. On the third pass, a polished wooden door with a brass handle appeared abruptly, and then tried to look as if it had been there all along. Hermione stepped forwards and opened it firmly, and they went through into an Aladdin's cave of lumbar.

To Lynsey's Muggle eyes, it looked like a cross between a jumble-sale and the biggest DIY store in the world - a vast room like an aircraft hangar, with clear aisles extending back and back between towering walls of who-knew-what, the whole illuminated by the light which came slanting in from elsewhere. Curious, she drifted over to one of the high windows, and looked out on a stretch of moorland and a bare hillside where a few wind-stunted trees bent their backs and held on grimly. Strange lights flickered and moved among the trees as she watched. Her professor came to stand behind her, placing his hand on her shoulder, but when she looked round at him in pleasure, expecting a smile, his gaze was fixed on the bleak hill beyond the window and his face was tight with grief.

The next window showed another scene altogether.

"Here it is," Harry called from some distance away. They picked their way towards him, down alleyways between tottering stacks of broken desks and chairs and four-poster beds, through libraries of battered books, past piles of clothes and bottles of shimmering potions and bottles of cheap sherry, edging their narrow way between obscure magical toys and tools and ancient weapons, some of them still bloody. Ron and Hermione walked ahead of them, holding hands and whispering.

On one level, Lynsey was fascinated, and could have spent weeks, months, years sorting through the debris of the ages. Even tat and kitsch become historical and interesting after a hundred and fifty years or so. But a lot of this stuff had something slightly nasty about it: the jars glowed with an unhealthy phosphorescence, and even the Frisbees were designed to bite.

Halfway to Harry, they passed by what looked like a stuffed example of one of the hippo-creatures from the tapestry. The professor's mouth tightened at the sight. "Aren't those - those things - sentient?" she asked quietly.

"Trolls," he said shortly. "And yes - more or less. But there are some wizards who would turn Muggles into trophies, if they got the chance."

"Urrgh."

"Be fair," Ron said, overhearing them: "I heard that the troll chiefs make their thrones out of human bones."

Harry was standing by a blistered, battered cupboard, holding a very tattered old school text-book. Severus sucked in his breath and stepped forward, his eyes on the book; after an almost imperceptible moment of hesitation, of possessiveness, Harry held it out to him without a word. Behind him, the cupboard door hung open, and Lynsey glimpsed a birdcage containing the bones of some small, bizarre creature which she suspected unhappily had been brought there alive and left to die of thirst. She huddled closer to her professor, who was flicking through pages of smudgy old-fashioned type, heavily annotated in a small, spiky scrawl which she recognized very well, even though his writing had become larger and more confident-looking with age.

"You know," Ron said thoughtfully, gazing around him, "if You-Know-Who did hide a Horcrux at Hogwarts, this would be the place to do it. I mean, who knows what's in among all this stuff?"

Hermione tutted under her breath. "We've been through all that, Ron. I'm quite sure Professor Dumbledore wouldn't have let Riddle walk about Hogwarts unsupervised once he knew about the Death Eaters, even if he did claim to be there for a job."

"He wasn't infallible, Granger," Severus snapped: "he just wanted people to think he was. We can ask him, but - in any case, how do we know Riddle didn't make a third Horcrux before he even left school, and hid it here while he had a legitimate right to roam around the castle as he pleased?"

"Good point." Harry raised his wand and performed a complex little twiddle. "_Accio Horcrux_... nothing. Nothing happened in the cave when I tried it either but then there really _wasn't_ a Horcrux in the cave, so I suppose..."

"That doesn't actually prove there isn't one," said Hermione, frowning. "_If_ there is one here it could have been warded against common Summoning and Detection Charms - couldn't it sir?"

"Indeed. And there are many objects here which might have occurred to - Him - as a suitable repository." His eyes flickered as his gaze shifted from point to point, and Lynsey looked where he was looking, as far as she could -

- a dagger inlaid with ominous symbols, with a golden snake twisting about its hilt; an ancient ornate lamp of the type traditionally used to contain a djinn; a small but vigorously active statuette of two centaurs coupling, which made Severus's Adam's apple bob and Lynsey's own mouth go suddenly dry; a battered but noble portrait-bust of a plain-featured, stern old man on whose head some wag had placed a wig and a tiara; a painting, half-seen among the piles of junk, in which demonic figures capered and gibbered; a cut-glass vial, stoppered with a grinning skull, which seemed to glow with its own inner light; a musical-box which played a wisp of sinister, skittery tune when Severus's eye lit on it -

"Can you sense it?" she asked quietly. "If not, how will you ever find it - assuming it's here, of course."

"Assuming it's here," he agreed. "We could borrow Argus's Probity Probe and search for magical objects which are concealing their nature, but there must be hundreds, at least - it would take weeks, months, and we have to be out by tomorrow evening..."

"If you can get the Probe off Filch," Harry said, "I could get Kreacher to search..."

"You trust him," the professor said, startled, "after what he -"

"Oh yes. He and I have come to a - an understanding." He wrinkled his nose. "'Course, I'll have to do my own cooking for a bit, but I'm not a bad cook, actually and, well, who needs to clean for a few weeks?"

"Harry!" Hermione exclaimed, and Ron grinned. "If it gets too rank," he said, "I'm sure Mum would put you up at The Burrow for a bit."

"He _can_ clean," Hermione muttered apologetically to no-one in particular, "I know he can - he just _doesn't_."

"Wouldn't want Kreacher to think I can manage without him," Harry replied smugly; "I wouldn't want to hurt his feelings."

"Very well." Severus nodded curtly to Harry. "I'll make the necessary arrangements with Argus before we leave."

As they turned to go, Lynsey's eye was drawn again to the energetic centaurs. At least, if these figures were actually conscious there was no fear that they were locked in eternal torment like the wizard with the pirouetting trolls: quite the reverse, in fact. "Do you suppose I could..." she began, placing her hand on his wrist to detain him a moment, and Severus flashed her a wolfish grin.

"Why not? They've probably been there for centuries, I doubt the owner is coming back for them. I'll have to check them with the Probity Probe, just in case, but I really can't see Him placing his soul in something so - joyful." He shut his eyes briefly, and she felt the bone-deep flinch shiver across his skin, under the light touch of her fingers. "He prefers His eroticism rather darker."

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Afterwards, she trailed behind Severus as he and Minerva mounted the revolving escalator to the Head's office and packed all the ticking, whirring silver instruments, with their cogs and dials and their spidery legs, into a brass-bound chest the size of a shoebox which appeared nevertheless to be bottomless. A slight, earnest boy called Colin Creevey, with floppy mouse-brown hair and acne, set up a camera as odd-looking as the instruments and used it to capture Dumbledore's portrait on film, while the old man chuckled and exclaimed and twinkled his periwinkle-blue eyes, and generally played the harmless old codger for all it was worth.

The result was not quite like a normal wizarding portrait, at least as that had been explained to Lynsey. Dumbledore's face was in the photograph at all times, even when he was also in the portrait proper, but when he was in his portrait the photograph behaved like the ones in the newspaper: a simple looped tape with a limited degree of interactivity, although even that was enough to make her think uneasily about those tribes who believed that photography stole a part of the soul. But the old man could, at will or when called for, transfer the whole of himself into the photograph, and then he departed from the portrait and the photo' became fully conscious, and could even speak, although the voice was as faint and far and tinny as a cheap radio.

After that, Severus had to speak to Filch and to take his turn at supervising the students, and Lynsey, tired out by all the stairs, opted to flop out in his rooms and wait for him there. He showed her which books she could safely examine and which were liable to burn her eyeballs out if she tried to read them and then, looking touchingly awkward and both pleased and embarrassed, he showed her a strange old record-player which would run in a magical environment, and a stack of records which must have been his when he was a boy, and have come with him when he was twenty-one, all raw and new to teaching and to spying. She wondered if he had ever played them in the years since.

She selected an album - Steeleye Span again, the music of their youth for both of them - and flopped back on the battered sofa with a glass of brandy in her hand, watching the six-inch high bronze centaurs necking and quivering and pumping in an eternity of artistically-rendered desire as Maddy Prior's harsh voice soared in song:

"I'm afraid the shining sun  
Might burn and scorch his beauty,  
And if I were with my love  
I would do my duty."

After a while she looked away, embarrassed by and a little ashamed of her own temptation to watch, and breathless with desire and sorrow for her friend for whom that simple physical enjoyment had been made so unhappy and so difficult.

The voice soared on:

"I've seen 'em a-comin' in from the mountains and glen,  
Both rosy-faced lasses and strappin' young men  
With a joy in their heart and unburdened o' care,  
A-meetin' old friends at Copshawholme Fair.

"There's lads for the lasses, there's toys for the bairns..."

It stopped her breath: for a moment she remembered what it had been to be twenty and full of hope, as her friend perhaps had never been...

"Oh the nut-men and spice-men at Copshawholme Fair..."

The song spun on, talking about the hiring fair, the teenagers leaving home and going away to work for the first time, the seasoned workers hoping for a better place. And the past ached in her breast like a sore tooth, for growing up and growing old, for all the times and the people and the chances that were gone, for all the young men and their lassies who had danced away into history, and the fairs and the dancing and that whole green countryside from before the trenches along with them -

"And I never will lie with my mammy nae mair;  
The fiddles play briskly at Copshawholme Fair."

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Prior's scornful voice was singing of eighteenth century London in its hunger and glamour and false appearance when Severus came in at about ten o'clock, looking tired and frazzled, and gave Lynsey a tight, weary smile. She went to make him a cup of tea from the kettle in the corner, but could find no way to power or light it until the professor came up behind her and ignited a ball of bluebell-coloured flame under the kettle with a wordless flick of his wand.

They sat in companionable near-silence for a while, drinking tea with newt-shaped ginger-nut biscuits with little crunchy silver-ball eyes, listening to the music and making desultory conversation. Severus, Lynsey noted, was still flicking irritably at his hair as if it troubled him. At some point, his eye lit on the busy little centaurs on the mantelpiece and he paused with the cup halfway to his lips and swallowed convulsively, a faint pink flush spreading along his jawline.

Lynsey grinned at him. "Bedtime?"

He tore his gaze away from the animate statue with some difficulty and gave her a wary look. "To sleep, or...?"

"I thought you might like to um build on your success of last night, if - if you're happy with that."

"My success!" he snapped with sudden bitter derision. "Just because I managed to..."

"Everybody's got to start somewhere, pet, and I was, um, favourably impressed. I just thought you might like to, uh, practise some more - while we've got the romantic four-poster and the drapes and everything."

He gave her an amused look. "But it's not romantic to me, is it? Four-poster beds in old castles are there for a very practical reason - to keep out the draughts. And this place is -" He pulled a wry face. "I suppose it's the nearest thing to a home I have - had - and since I don't know if I'll ever see it again I suppose there's a certain satisfaction in marking the end of my residence here by proving that I'm not a, a bloody eunoch and I can have - friends and, and sex that I actually wanted to have. So if you feel like joining me in sticking two fingers up to all the bastards who told me I was too bloody ugly ever to get the girl..."

"Absolutely - even if I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to count as a girl..."

"Woman, then." He gave her a sudden sweet, fleeting smile. "You were worth waiting for. But if I'm going to go to bed - in either sense - I suppose I'm going to have to shower again first. Poppy did her best, but I'm still a bit treacly behind the ears."

She wondered why he suddenly looked so fed-up as he said it. "Is that a big deal?" she asked cautiously, "having to shower twice? I know you said when you were at Spinner's End you kind-of got out of the habit of washing your hair every day, because of having to do it in the kitchen sink, but..."

"It's not that - not exactly - I just - I prefer not to use soap but I'll have to; I won't get this out without it."

"Well, soap can be very drying, but if you use the right shampoo... no?"

He ducked his head, letting his still slightly sticky hair swing forward to hide his face, but she could see his lips drawn back into a tight line.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," she murmured, realising uneasily that they had probably strayed into one of those jagged areas of broken glass and barbed wire which were so liberally stitched through his psyche.

"No, it's all right," he muttered, "it's not - not anything dreadful." He looked up again, his face full of bitter mockery. "I suppose there's no reason not to tell you - you deserve to know what you're getting into bed with.

"Potter's father and his delightful cronies, under the beech tree, when they - when they attacked me I swore at them and so charming fucking Potter used _Scourgify_ to wash my mouth out. He filled my mouth with soap till I was choking on it, it was in my throat, my nose, it was foul, stinging, bitter, and then _she_ came, Lily, and she - I loved her so much, I desired her so much but I didn't want her to see me like that, you understand, and I thought she was flirting with him - she was defending me but I was so angry and like the stupid bloody fool I was I swore at her too and called her a Mudblood which was - which was unforgiveable and she... didn't. She never forgave me, and now I can't bear to taste soap because it tastes like losing her again."

"Oh, pet." She thought privately that the sainted Lily had deserved a sharp slap for being so precious, but now was definitely not the moment to say so.

"I denied her, you know," he said, his voice gone suddenly remote. "Like Simon Peter in the Bible. He, Riddle, He hadn't to know how much I loved her, how much I hated Him for killing her... when I begged Him to spare her I had to pretend that all I wanted her for was a quick bloody screw because that was all He could understand and all the love He thought I was capable of, and when I went back to Him I'd to tell Him that I - that I'd realised I could do better than a dirty little _Mudblood_. And, and prove it by carrying on with some pure-blooded tart at a revel..."

"Hum, well, personally I always thought that Simon Peter was just... being practical. He wanted to find out what had happened to his friend, and the best way to do that was to pretend to be someone else altogether, and keep his head down. The significance of his denial was that Yeshua's dark prediction was coming true, I think, not that Simon was a traitor. Like Judas. If you take out all the journalistic colour - the bits about his inner motives which the writer couldn't actually have known except maybe by clairvoyance - it's pretty clear he was only doing exactly what Yeshua told him to do, but he got blamed for it anyway."

"Like me," he said with a sigh, "except I didn't even do what I was ordered to do."

"Yes. But you didn't betray Dumbledore, unless it was by not killing him, and you didn't betray Lily either. You were just - doing what you needed to do in order to avenge her."

"I suppose so." He did not sound very convinced.

Lynsey leaned forward and laid her hand on her friend's arm. "If you like," she said uncertainly, "I could shower with you - not, not to _do_ anything, I mean, unless you wanted to, but then you can put your head right back and I'll wash your hair for you, to keep the soap off your face." She thought about this for a moment. "And don't turn down the offer out of hand because you think it would be unmanly or imposing or some such bloody thing, because I'd like it, and you're allowed to enjoy having your lover do nice things for you."

He smiled his tired little smile. "All right," he said wryly, "I won't - reject it out of hand, I mean. It sounds... agreeable. As foreplay, if nothing else."

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As he felt her bare skin against his he tensed and started forwards, away from the contact, but she held him close, resting her chin in his shoulder and pressing her breasts against his naked back. "I hope," she growled softly in his ear, "that I don't feel like a bloke." After a moment he gave a wild little laugh and relaxed back against her.

"Not a bit: you don't have the stubble for it."

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He leaned back into her embrace as they sat together in the long, Victorian-style bath, under the warm fall of the shower, with his eyes closed and his prow of a nose pointing to the ceiling as she worked her own shampoo through his long hair, washing out the sticky mess that Peeves had made of it. He was still underweight, pale and scarred, but he seemed fairly relaxed.

"Did you know," he said suddenly, without opening his eyes, "Minerva told me that Remus and Tonks are actually going out together? ... or staying in together: I wonder if her talents extend to turning into a she-wolf...?"

"Stoppit, you - if you keep making catty remarks, you'll grow whiskers."

"Yes, mummy."

She paused briefly in working the shampoo through his hair to pat him on the head, and he made a half-hearted attempt to bite her hand.

"I'm allowed to be catty about Remus," he muttered, "or _bitch_y, if you prefer, on account of all the _cattiness_ I had to endure from him, over the years. Even if he wasn't quite as bad as the other three, and even if - even if he did help to save me, in the end. I'm not - not ungrateful, at least I think I'm not, but it doesn't make it suddenly all roses and iced buns either."

"You should be moderately grateful, I think, but not excessively so. You have a right to expect that fellow Order members will assist you if you're in bad trouble - and to resent it if they don't." Frowning, she tilted his head further back so she could use the shower-head to rinse the soap away, without any of it getting into his mouth. "That was why you - why you reacted badly when he offered to Scourgify you, in Azkaban. I mean, because he was part of the gang who made you eat soap, before."

"Your observations are, as usual, precise."

"I did wonder about that at the time," she said as she sluiced the warm water through his heavy hair, "and why you" - and she knew it was a stupid thing to say as the words escaped from her mouth, but the compliment had rattled her - "wouldn't take Pepperup" she finished, before she could bite it back.

She felt the shudder which began in his shoulder-blades and progressed all the way out to his feet as the dark eyes flew open, staring at nothing. "Sorry", she muttered, stilling her hands, and then after a moment's hesitation she resumed smoothing his hair out, parting the strands gently with a comb, handling him like glass.

After a while, his breathing steadied and his eyes lost their frozen, panicked look, and a while after that he sighed suddenly, stirring restlessly under her hands, and said: "It was how they kept me conscious - one of the ways. When I was... being tortured. If I started to black out, Lucius force-fed me Pepperup and now I can't - can't - and I felt so s-s-_stupid_, knowing that steam was pouring out of my ears even while they were..."

"Um," she said, wondering whether she was doing the right thing or not, but doing the best she could anyway, "there's this book called, um, _Djinn Rummy_, by a guy called Tom Holt, where one of the characters refers to a particularly horrible plan for the destruction of humanity as having 'that ultimately humiliating soupon of frivolity that marks the true evil genius'."

"Yes," he said with a sigh, bowing his head forwards and pulling away from the comb as he did so.

"Of course, this particular evil plan involved a giant, man-eating primrose, which probably..."

Severus gave a sudden, throaty little laugh and relaxed, sagging bonelessly back into her hands. "Even Lucius never came up with that one - and besides, primroses need rich soil, and Wiltshire's on chalk."

She began to smooth conditioner into his hair, letting the heavy strands stroke across her knuckles. "If you need something to wake you up and you can't use - you know, the wizarding stuff, I'll have to introduce you to the joys of Red Bull."

"Mmm?"

"Muggle thing - a drink to wake you up when you're sleepy. Full of caffeine and stuff - according to their advertising it's supposed to 'give you wings'."

"You give me wings," he said drowsily. Looking down at his slim flanks and the ivory jut of his pelvis, she saw that he was already half-hard.

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Standing, now, under the rush of the water, Severus's long hands lathered her hair in turn, since there was little risk of him getting any soap into his mouth this way. When he had rinsed the foam away, he brushed her hair to one side with his fingers and planted a tentative, careful kiss on the nape of her neck.

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"You know," she said severely, "it's not very flattering when you grit your teeth every time I touch you."

"I know." He wriggled awkwardly. "I am trying, it's just - difficult and I'm still - still sore from some of the things they..."

"Enough to want to stop?"

"No! It's just - it makes it harder. Or _not_, as the case may be. But I can certainly touch you... may I touch you?"

"Absolutely..."

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"Perhaps you should watch the centaurs," she said, "they might give you ideas" and she felt rather than saw his crooked smile, his lips being pressed into the hollow of her neck at the time, and his skilful hands busy around and about.

"I have, and they did," he said, his honey-and-silk voice tickling against her skin, "but they make me feel... well, furiously randy, of course, on one level -"

"This is what we like to hear," she said facetiously, wrapping her left hand firmly around his ribs and trailing the fingers of the other lightly down his chest and stomach, looking for the proof of it. His skin was textured with scars, especially on his back; she rubbed her left thumb absent-mindedly across a deep score on his ribs and he jerked and shuddered, reminding her that he was very, very ticklish.

"And on the other level?"

"Sad," he admitted with a sigh, "and jealous, and I don't only mean of the stallion's - endowment. They just look so - happy and uncomplicated, unlike..." He started forwards with a gasp as the fingers of her right hand found what they were looking for and stroked along it, and she brought her other hand round to tilt his chin up and kiss him deep and soundly as the pulse of his desire beat against her palm.

"It's over-late for 'uncomplicated'," she murmured, as he splayed his long hands against her back and slid towards and into her, "but 'happy' - happy we can manage, I think. In time."

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Tired to the bone by these latest exertions, he fell asleep still wrapped around and inside her, his sharp chin resting on her shoulder, and the warmth and communion of it were enough compensation for the rather awkward position, although Lynsey knew her joints would be protesting by morning. Severus was actually not snoring, which she put down to his lying more or less on his front, and she drifted peacefully in and out of sleep, holding him close and being held, drowsily watching the grey pre-dawn light bringing a little colour into the green velvet drapes of the bed and still feeling vaguely, pleasurably aroused by the intimate touch of him inside her.

When he finally stirred himself and rolled away from her, she half woke and protested sleepily, but he kissed her on the forehead, a brief peck, and lay back down next to her, encased in one of his horrible nightshirts. She sighed regretfully, since she had been enjoying the feel of his bare skin, but she knew that he was still too traumatised by all that had been done to him to sleep naked without fear, and her minor disappointment was a small price to pay for his sleeping easy for once.

And he did, for a wonder. He tucked himself down against her with a sigh and draped his left arm across her ribs, and for once there were no further night-time disturbances.

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When she woke fully, the sun was well up and there were no arms around her. She groped blearily for Severus's presence beside her and found only emptiness, but she had no feeling of alarm. Crawling stiffly out of bed, she flung a dressing-gown around her shoulders in case he had company and creaked her way to the living room, where she found him lounging on the sofa with his feet up, still in his nightshirt, poring over one of the books he had got from the Merchieftainess.

The other books - there were eight of them - were spread out on the floor beside him, most of them open, arranged into arcane groups. None of them looked like an easy read. The largest, which was bound in some strange cherry-red fur, was actually smoking slightly. As she came into the room Severus looked up, his stern expression lifting into a smile, and swung his feet down to the floor so that she could sit next to him if she wished. As he did so he raised the book he was holding slightly so that she could see the cover. It was black - absolutely black, like a hole into somewhere else - small and comparatively-modern looking, and the title was scrawled across the cover in spiky golden handwriting which shimmered and moved as she watched. _The Word in Darkness_.

"Lynsey," he said without preamble, "listen to this!

"'I saw how the spokes  
Of that dreadful cross  
Which abides in darkness  
Turn at a death;  
When the slayer shall be slain -  
When the sundered one shall be sundered from life -  
The indweller goes to the dead and the outdweller  
Goes to the body,  
Leaving the vessel dry...'"

"You think - evidence that Horcruxes are actually used up when the originator un-dies?"

"Evidence that Eleusinia the Seer thought that they were, anyway, assuming this translation is accurate."

"And is she - is it a she? - a reliable source?"

"Reasonably so. It's not absolute proof but it's a start, it's _something_, and that's something more than we had last week!" He was still far too pale and far too thin, but his clever, intent face was alight with curiosity and pride. Behind his head, on the mantel, the bronze centaurs were still about their business, but in the cold light of the morning their busy industry made Lynsey feel more tired than aroused.

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The early part of the day was to be taken up with organised war-games, with the students divided into two teams and playing out a script involving the capture of an enemy commander. They were planning to leave and return to London in the late afternoon, so before breakfast Lynsey and Severus packed their belongings. Lynsey supposed her own belongings now included the amorous centaurs, about whom she now had somewhat uneasy feelings, especially when she felt them squirming busily in her hands: but she could hardly leave them where some Ministry official might think they were Severus's fault.

After Filius, in the guise of the commander of the purple team, had been first captured by the orange team and then, after a pause for lunch, daringly rescued by his own side, and he and Severus had debriefed the combatants and commented on the highs and lows of their performance over the weekend, then it was time to gather up their belongings and trail down through the green grounds, past the lake in the sunlight and around the curve of the Forest to the great gates. As they went through, Severus cast one long, hard look back towards the castle, and Lynsey knew that he was wondering whether he would ever see it again.

He kept his promise to introduce her to some wizarding drinks. The departure-point was through the Floo in the Three Broomsticks, but a party from the Order bypassed it and went further down the high street and then up a side-road to a run-down pub whose sign showed the severed head of a boar, oozing gorily. The words ran unbidden through her mind: _Caput apri defero / Reddens laudes Domino_...

The bar was spacious, with proper pine tables and large windows, but there was a coat of dust and grime over everything and the clientele were distinctly dodgy. As Lynsey walked across the floor, her feet stuck to it slightly at every step.

The landlord of this shabby establishment, it transpired, was Dumbledore's brother Aberforth, who was an Order member himself, a dignified if grubby old man with the same cornflower eyes as his brother. Severus flinched slightly at the sight of him and made as if to touch his ear, and Lynsey wondered what that was about.

Apart from Severus himself there were with the party the looming bulk of Hagrid accompanied by a large, slobbery mastiff; Minerva; Filius and Poppy who were, Lynsey had learned, only recent additions to the Order; Harry, Ron and Hermione; Neville; the girl Luna (an ash blond with an eco-hippy dress-sense and slightly protuberant, considering, silvery eyes) and, bringing up the rear, another girl with carrot hair and the rich chestnut irises one sometimes sees in redheads, who was, Lynsey gathered, both Ron's sister and Harry's girlfriend.

When he saw the orange-haired girl, Aberforth tutted under his breath. "Allowing underage kids into the Order are we now, Minnie?" he said scathingly, and Minerva spun round, apparently catching sight of the girl for the first time, and exclaimed "Ginevra - what I have I told you...?"

The redhead raised her chin defiantly. "That I'm too young because I won't turn seventeen until August, as if Harry wasn't fighting the Dark Lord - and you lot weren't letting him! - " (under his breath, Severus muttered _I wasn't_ and Aberforth growled _Nor was I_) "when he was eleven. But I know more about Tom than _any_ of you - even Harry and Professor Snape. Besides," she added, sitting down composedly at the nearest table, "it's a free country. I'm sixteen - I can have a drink in the pub if I want to, so long as I'm in a room where there's food." She curled her lip at a plate of yellowing sandwiches on the bar.

Minerva pursed her lips. After a moment she nodded curtly. "Very well: but I must insist that you remain aside from any combat situations until you are of age."

"Yes," Ginevra replied, rather ambiguously; Lynsey suspected that she had agreed to the proposition that Minerva must insist it, rather than to the thing itself.

True to his promise, Severus introduced Lynsey to a range of things in curious, mostly rather sticky bottles. She was especially taken with an ice-blue, glimmering liqueur called Yeti's Breath. When the conversation about the training exercise had rambled on for long enough for any listener to have lost interest, Filius cast a Confundus Charm tailored to make outsiders hear anything they might say as more of the same.

"So," he said softly, watching Severus with an obvious, gentle concern which probably irritated him no end, "the Horcruxes - did you discover anything significant in Albus's books?"

"A little - enough to confirm that the more Horcruxes Riddle makes, the more unstable his soul becomes; and a strong suggestion that the Horcrux acts as a backup rather than an anchor, so that when the principal is killed a Horcrux is used up in restoring him to life."

"So if we keep finding and destroying Horcruxes, and he keeps making more, what will happen to his soul?" Hermione said interestedly.

"He will become ever madder, Miss Granger, and more detached from reality."

"But that won't necessarily make him any less dangerous, will it?" Luna said dreamily.

"But the spell, Severus," Minerva said; "do you have the actual spell?"

"Give me a chance," Severus snapped ungraciously; " I have a possible lead, but there's at least a week's worth of research to do, and do we even have access to the Ministry yet?"

"Dad's working on it," Ron said earnestly, "but listen, I've been thinking."

Lynsey could see the obvious retort hovering on her friend's lips, but after a brief internal struggle he said only: "Go on."

"Yes Ron, tell us please" Minerva said.

"Well - Harry said that you said it had to be something really destructive, to kill a Horcrux."

"You don't actually kill a Horcrux, Ron, strictly speaking," Hermione said. "It's not _actually_ alive."

"But you can um, denature it, can't you?" That was Neville.

"What did Professor Dumbledore use on the ring?" Harry asked. "He never told me."

"He used Gryffindor's sword, Potter, but unless we can make a convincing, permanent duplicate I think the Ministry would notice if we removed it."

"But that's what I've been thinking about," Ron said. "I mean not - not duplicating the sword, but really destructive stuff." A typical teenage male preoccupation, Lynsey thought privately. "That - that basilisk Harry killed, he used one fang to kill -" he glanced at Hermione "- or whatever the diary, but the other one must still be down there."

"There were a lot of them," Ginny said. "Just - lying around in the tunnel."

"Yeh," Hagrid said, "tha's right, the fangs grow all the time - it'd've shed them all through where it was living. Poor thing," he added vaguely.

Hermione looked interested. "Could it have been traces of basilisk venom on the sword which gave it the power to ki- to denature the ring?"

"It could, yes," Severus said thoughtfully, "and your idea is a sound one, Mr Weasley. But it would need a Parselmouth -" he inclined his head slightly towards Harry "- to open the way. Even Professor Dumbledore was unable to gain access, though I know he reviewed the Chamber in Fawkes's memory of it."

"I can go down there," Harry said. "That's not a problem. Sir."

"The problem Potter is that you're too young -"

"I'm of age!"

"Severus is right, boy," Aberforth said, beginning to gather up the empty glasses and bottles; "of age you may be, but seventeen is no age to go risking your neck."

"I've been risking my neck since I was -"

"_This_ time," Severus interrupted firmly, "someone will go with you - someone older and more experienced. Suppose there was a second basilisk? No Rubeus, not you" he added without looking round; "the access-passage is too narrow." He rubbed wearily at his forehead. "As the youngest and fittest fully adult wizard present by far, logically, it will be me: and we must do it today, if we are going to, for who knows when the Ministry will next permit us access?"

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The path from Hogsmeade to Hogwarts was an attractive one, just right for an afternoon stroll in the country; but by the third repetition the long walk along the lane and over the fields was beginning to seem less of a pleasure and more of a chore, especially when it came on to rain. Lynsey could have stayed behind, with Aberforth, but she didn't want to be absent when Severus might be going into danger, or at least into a situation he would find stressful.

The access point was through a disused girls' bathroom, where Lynsey could half see, half sense a disturbed and disturbing psychic presence. Harry said "Oh, hello Myrtle" to it vaguely, and then spoke to one of the china sinks on the wall in a harsh, choking hiss. One of the taps, which had a small snake scratched into the brass, began to glow and then spun on its own, releasing some sort of catch. The sink sank down into a recess in the floor, exposing the wall behind it, in which there was the start of a chute wide enough to admit a person of middling build. Harry started towards it but Severus clamped a hand firmly on his shoulder and pushed the boy behind him. With a tight-lipped nod to Lynsey, and to Minerva and Filius, he shed his cloak, gripped his lit wand in one hand, flicked his robes into a tight spiral around his legs so that they would not ride up in the chute, eased his feet into the dark opening and slid from sight.

Harry waited long enough to be sure he wouldn't crash feet-first into the professor's back, and then followed him down, clutching a small beaded handbag which apparently belonged to Hermione.

Some time later, Lynsey found herself standing in the corridor, looking down from a window into an enclosed courtyard, in company with the Lovegood girl. As if they had already been deep in conversation, Luna jerked her head slightly towards the bathroom. "Harry tries to be kind to Myrtle," she said, "but even Harry doesn't treat her like a real person, and Ron is rather horrible to her."

"Who is she?"

"A girl the basilisk killed, some time in the forties. She isn't very nice, really, but it isn't nice for her, being a ghost, so I try to say hello to her at least a couple of times a week. When I'm here, of course, and she isn't off spying on boys in the showers, or on the mermen."

"And you can... see her? Talk to her? I mean - as if she was physically there?"

"Oh yes." She flicked her long grey-blond hair back, so that the little silver bells hanging from her ears jingled. "I'm glad you're sleeping with Professor Snape: it will be good for him to feel someone really wants him."

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Hagrid, who had the sharpest hearing, hovered at the mouth of the chute, his vast shoulders filling the room, listening for any sign of trouble or danger; but all that floated back was an occasional faint rustle of voices, talking. At least Harry and Severus did not seem to have come to blows.

It was more than forty minutes before a glimmer of light in the depths of the chute became Severus's doe Patronus - the horse for war, Lynsey supposed, and the doe for peace. It opened its delicate, patrician mouth and purred "Ready when you are, Minerva" in Severus's silky drawl.

Minerva flicked her wand at the chute, and a skein of thick rope shot out of it and rattled away down into the dark. Another gesture, and the near end of the rope wrapped itself tightly around the base of one of the sinks and cinched itself into a knot. After a few moments first Harry and then Severus appeared, floating without weight, gripping the rope as it contracted and hauled them effortlessly upwards. Harry shot out like a cork from a bottle and began to float towards the ceiling: Severus, coming after, flipped his wand at the boy and brought him back to earth with a bump.

"Well? Did you get them?" Ron said eagerly and Harry, grinning, opened the bead bag and made as if to plunge his hand into it.

"Careful with that, Potter," Severus snapped. "If you get scratched, I've no phoenix tears to save you." He took the frothy, feminine-looking bag from Harry with an expression of vague distaste, held it out at arm's length a few inches above the floor and turned it over, and several wicked-looking, arm-length teeth slid out onto the floor.

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They left Hagrid and his slobberingly enthusiastic dog behind them at the edge of the Forest, and walked down through the grounds and out over the fields once more in a tired but companionable group. Lynsey was pleased to see how relaxed her professor looked in this company, now. Since there was nobody here from whom they needed to hide, as they walked down the high street towards the Three Broomsticks Severus took her hand, and held onto it all the way down to the pub, through the spiralling green fire of the Floo and out again into the makeshift school in Diagon Alley.

As they emerged into the street, blinking in the low-angled sun of early evening, a man in a violet cloak did a visible double-take at the sight of Severus. The amiable expression which had been on his face a moment before froze with an awful finality, and Lynsey felt her friend's fingers clench convulsively, digging into her hand as the wizard spat and turned away in scorn. And around them, the city went its ways.

"London is a dainty place;"

sang Prior's inimitable, never-to-be-repeated, bounding, bitter voice,

"A great and gallant city.  
All the streets are paved with gold,  
And all the folk are witty."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Seaweed is a kind of algae, and algae are no longer strictly speaking considered to be plants.

Haar is a Scots word for a thick white mist, most often seen early in the morning.

In canon, Tom didn't develop an interest in the Elder Wand until after Harry's wand fired at him of its own accord, during the chase after the seven Harrys. In this universe, the time-line diverged just before the end of HBP, when Percy noticed that certain Ministry officials had been Imperiused, and raised the alarm. Voldemort's takeover of the Ministry, and of Hogwarts, had to be aborted, leaving Snape as a fugitive rather than Headmaster, and Harry was smuggled out of Privet Drive simply by walking through the door behind the Dursleys, wearing his Invisibility Cloak. Tom has not yet (at least so far as anyone knows) begun to take an interest in the Elder Wand.

Severus was told a little bit about the Wand by Dumbledore in order to prepare him to own it (as he would have done had Draco not intervened), and he had worked out more. But Tom did not know to ask him about it when he was tortured, and although Snape broke and told Tom whatever he wanted to know, he did not volunteer information he wasn't specifically asked for. So Tom does not know that Dumbledore's wand was anything special.

Severus knows that the Elder Wand might be capable of destroying Horcruxes, and he knows the Wand itself is in Dumbledore's tomb, but he also knows that the mastery has probably gone to Draco, who disarmed Dumbledore. His Unbreakable Vow to protect Draco to the best of his abilities means he can't knowingly endanger him, even if he would. He would like it if he or one of the Trio could challenge Draco, defeat him and thereby claim the mastery of the Elder Wand for their faction, but he also has to act so as to maximise Draco's safety.

On the one hand Draco has the mastery of a super-weapon which should make him invincible in battle, and though he doesn't currently have access to it he might have some day. On the other hand possession of the mastery makes Draco a target - worse, if Tom ever finds out about it, it will make Draco a target to Tom. Severus has to decide where Draco's greatest safety lies, and he cannot discuss it with Lynsey because there is no benefit to Draco from his telling her, and if she was ever captured, the fact that he had told her about Draco having the mastery would put Draco in danger from Tom.

Telling the Trio also increases the danger of Draco being found out, since Harry's mind is linked to Tom's and any of them could be captured and tortured, but on the other hand if he decides that Draco would be safer without the mastery, telling the Trio that they should challenge and defeat Draco if they get the chance would be an action which protected Draco, or tried to. The only person he can discuss this with without risking breaking his Vow, and who can therefore help him to decide whether to tell the Trio or not, is portrait!Dumbledore, since Dumbledore already knows that the mastery went to Draco, and therefore talking about it with him does not increase Draco's danger.

"Shot!" is a Derbyshire expression meaning "Well done," probably a contraction of "Good shot."

"Wicked" in British slang has a secondary meaning of "impressively clever".

Highly-strung horses, especially racehorses, may become nervous on their own and require the company of another animal to travel with them and calm them. Goats, small ponies and cats have all traditionally been used for this purpose.

The Disney animated film _Fantasia_ famously includes a ballet where the dancers are all hippos in tutus. This scene may well have inspired JKR to come up with the idea of Barnabas the Barmy and his dancing trolls.

In DH, Harry assumes that Tom must have hidden the diadem in the Room of Requirement when he came to apply for the DADA job as an adult. However, we know from what the Grey Lady says that he was already searching for the diadem, and found out roughly where it was, while he was still a student. There's actually nothing in the text to say he didn't find the diadem during the holidays and hide it before he left school. All we know is that judging from the deterioration in his appearance, he made it at some point after the diary and before he stole the cup and locket from Hepzibah Smith: that is, between the end of his fifth year and a point some years after leaving school. He easily could have done it in his sixth or seventh year.

"I'm afraid the shining sun / Might burn and scorch his beauty" - from the traditional song _The Blacksmith_; both this song and _Copshawholme Fair_ are from the Steeleye Span album _Hark! The Village Wait_.

Here in Britain, sticking up the first two fingers in a V-sign with the back of the hand towards the onlooker is a gesture of defiance, and is the non-verbal equivalent of "fuck off".

To be "precious" in the sense in which Lynsey is using it is to be overly fussy and affected and melodramatic.

The only feasible etymology anyone seems to have come up with for the word Horcrux is "horrible cross", where cross is meant in the sense of an intersection. Dumbledore was only really guessing as to how many Horcruxes Tom had made; in the event he had seven, including Harry, but there's nothing in the text to say that there hadn't been another one, which was used up in keeping him alive when he was vaporized by Harry, and which he replaced with Nagini.

If we assume that he really did only intend to make six and had planned to use Harry's death to make the final one, then yes, the only Horcruxes were the ones we see - ring, diary, diadem, locket, cup, snake - but we still don't know for sure that one hadn't been used up in making Vapormort, because the Trio never actually test the cup to make sure it's still a Horcrux. So it's still an open question, in the books, whether the Horcrux is just an anchor or whether it's a backup - that is, whether when the body is killed the piece of soul which was in the body dies and a piece from a Horcrux takes its place.

_Caput apri defero / Reddens laudes Domino_ - "I bring in the boar's head, giving thanks to the Lord" - from the Steeleye Span single _The Boar's Head Carol_.

"London is a dainty place" - chorus of the song _London_, from the Steeleye Span album _Rocket Cottage_.

My enormous essay on Snape's personality, with special reference to the evidence for his being especially nasty (or not), has been updated to take DH canon into account. You can find it on the fannish section of my website at **www dot whitehound dot co dot uk slash Fanfic**, under the title _But Snape is just nasty, right?_

Also on there you will find an essay called _Fanfiction. net How-To_. This is a guide to how to use ffn's story-upload and editing features. It includes lists of what characters will and will not display properly in story, message and review text, and examples of dozens of interesting section breaks which will display correctly in ffn story-text, and which you can copy-and-paste into your own stories.


	19. 17 Household Accounts

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**17: HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS**  
((_In which various forms of petting are discussed._))

Since they were in London anyway, Lynsey introduced Severus to the delights of Muggle Covent Garden, and showed him the little exhibition-space and shop which specialised in wooden and card automata. He was more pleased with these than with any number of glibly glamorous spells, and bought two self-assembly kits: a Chinese dragon with a twisting, nodding head for her, and a ship which rose and fell among cardboard waves for himself. After a late-afternoon tea with cakes at a pavement café, watching the jugglers and dancers in the long, cobbled plaza within its frame of flat-fronted white buildings, they returned home by Apparating into a wood near Boarhills in the gathering dusk, and then catching the bus.

They put the cardboard kits away for another day, being much too tired for the intricacies of assembly and glue at this point. About the other, wizarding automata Lynsey had mixed feelings. She placed them on a shelf in the bedroom, where they might serve for inspiration - but on a corner unit where they would not be all the time catching the eye. Nestor promptly pounced on them and tried to eat them, and then retreated baffled when the moving little animal figures proved to be hard bronze. The cat slunk off to the sitting-room to wash himself furiously, and the centaurs kept at it: they were not, Lynsey noted, simply acting out an endlessly repeated loop, but varied their actions as if they were real, with tireless enthusiasm.

Lynsey and Severus, however, crawled into bed quite early with no intention beyond sleep, and curled up together in companionable, mutual exhaustion. Severus looked, she thought, more relaxed after a weekend filled with so much practical activity, and he slept the night through almost without interruption.

In the morning, he woke her with breakfast already cooked, although he had managed to burn the toast. All the way through the bacon and eggs he seemed pre-occupied and withdrawn, until Lynsey uneasily asked, "What?"

"Nothing, I just..." His husky early-morning voice trailed away uncomfortably; then: "I'm going to need more shelf-space," he said abruptly, staring into the murky depths of his tea. "For the books and for Albus's instruments, if - if that's all right. I thought that I could... buy something. Shelves."

She frowned at him, trying to work out why he looked so uncertain. "Sure," she said casually. "I'm sure we can wiggle another bookcase or two into the back bedroom, and you don't want to be all the time living out of suitcases - as it were." His expression lightened at once, and it occurred to her that he had been nervous about asking for a step which would put his residence on a more permanent footing. She thought about reassuring him that he could stay forever, as far as she was concerned - but perhaps it would embarrass him, or make him feel crowded.

"I ought to..." He ducked his head. "Now that I'm earning and - and everything, I ought to... contribute. I mean, not just food but - the household. If, that is..."

"If you want to put something in towards the mortgage, b- that would be grand." She had very nearly said "be my guest", but the point, she knew, was not to be a guest any more, however welcome, but a fixture, and she thought about the word "householder".

The professor still had his head down, looking wary: he glanced at her sideways and murmured, "I was wondering if you were... of course, it might just have been kindness or, or the _romantic_ setting, but you said that you were... favourably impressed?"

"Damn straight I was!"

"Oh." His shoulders relaxed visibly. "Good."

"Are you just fishing for compliments, or were you genuinely worried?"

He flashed her a sharp grin. "Both." The grin devolved into a grimace. "It's just - I was worried that I might be rather bad at it. Being so long out of practice, you understand, or never really in it."

"I should think you'd be good at anything you turned your hand to - as it were."

"It's true I always was a fast learner..."

"And one with great natural talent in many disparate fields. But in any case, all that stuff, that - that quest for sensation, it's all just optional extras. It's the closeness that matters."

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Severus, it seemed, was not the only person who was lacking in confidence in sexual matters. On Wednesday evening they were joined by Remus Lupin, ostensibly to report on Arthur and Kingsley's continuing efforts to get the Order access to the Ministry's spell-tracking facilities. After the official business, though, he lingered uneasily, soaking up coffee like a sponge and frowning at the rug.

"So," Severus said speculatively, steepling his fingers, "I heard from Minerva that you and the _flexible_ Miss Tonks were... 'walking out together', was the way she put it, 'instead of pussyfooting around' - and she would know. Are we to expect wedding bells... or perhaps the patter of tiny paws?"

Remus bared his teeth in a sudden growl. "It's not - my condition, it's not - heritable. But it's ignorant bloody oiks like you - "

"If you're too thick to know a joke when you hear it -"

"Then it was in exceedingly bloody poor taste!"

"And you would know about jokes in poor taste, wouldn't you?"

There was a sudden, frozen silence, which Lynsey broke by saying "Now, boys..." rather feebly. Two sets of eyes, one black and one amber, glared at her briefly, before the two men returned to their sudden flare-up.

"Yes, well," Remus muttered, dropping his gaze before Severus did; "_tasting_ you wasn't supposed to be part of the plan, until Sirius decided to make some unauthorised bloody modifications."

"I always knew that you were in on it," Severus said bitterly, "but no-one would believe me. Such a nice, _tame_ werewolf..."

"Don't!" Remus said sharply. "It wasn't - like that."

"Then you tell me - what was it like?"

Remus set his mug down on the coffee-table and pulled an irritated face. "You weren't supposed to get hurt, it was just - well, you couldn't cause trouble for me with the staff just by finding out what I was, because they all knew anyway, but I didn't want you telling everybody in class, either. Didn't want the hassle, you know? And the others - well, they'd just managed to become Animagi and we didn't want you finding out and getting them in trouble with the Ministry for not registering, or spoiling our fun before we'd properly begun."

"So you decided to kill m-"

"No!" Remus interrupted hotly. "Severus, I swear, no. You were just - James said, if you thought you knew what was happening you'd lose interest, he quoted some Muggle - Alan Somebody -"

"Alan Breck," Lynsey said automatically, recognising the quote, and Remus murmured "Yes - something like that."

"It's fiction," she said. "I mean - Alan Breck was a real person, but it's from a fictional account of him." She realised she was burbling, made nervous by the tension in the air between them - but the quote was one which appealed to her so much, which struck her as so profoundly and usefully true, that she had learned it by heart. "'Them that cannae tell the truth should be aye mindfu' to leave an honest, handy lee behind them. If folk dinnae ken what ye're doing, they're terrible taken up with it; but if they think they ken, they care nae mair for it than' - well, for something they don't care about at all. Pease porridge, according to Alan Breck, because he didna' - didn't - like it."

Remus gave a delicate little snort. "You're corrupting her, Severus - that sounded positively Slytherin."

"Now here I always thought that Alan Breck was a true Gryffindor," Severus said silkily; "always quarrelling and bragging about what a wonderful fighter he was."

"I didn't mean it nastily," Remus replied mildly; "and, God knows, the most devious bastard in our year turned out to be a Gryffindor, after all." He grimaced. "You were right to fear that one of us might be a danger to Lily, just wrong about - about _who_."

"I had the little bastard in my power," Severus said tightly. "I could have done - _anything_ to him, and I don't think Riddle would have missed him much, but I didn't want to be that person, not even for Lily, so I just - bossed him about a bit. Made him clean the dishes. But later, he - when I was in his power, he -" He swallowed, and Lynsey saw that his knuckles were almost tight enough to break through the skin.

"I wonder now if he put Sirius up to it," Remus said sombrely. "We thought he was just a - a sort of portable audience, or maybe what the Americans call a 'cheer leader', always there to sing the big boys' praises. But I can see now that he - he got off on that, on their - our - cruelty, and he was always winding us up to be worse, more reckless, more cruel, so he could get off on it some more." Severus made a rather sick sound, and Remus gave him an odd look, both sympathetic and measuring.

"Anyway..." he continued quietly, "when it was all four of us together, he agreed that we should let you see me, to satisfy your curiosity so you'd piss off and leave us alone, but I wonder whether when he had Sirius alone... or maybe I just don't want to believe Sirius could be that reckless or vicious on his own account."

Lynsey could see the catty remark struggling to escape from Severus's lips, and the manifest struggle with which he bit it back. By an effort of will, he managed to say only, "Go on." Remus flashed him a hunted look.

"That was it, really. We thought... if you satisfied your curiosity about me being a werewolf, you'd think that was all there was to find, and stop poking about. You couldn't very well tell everybody what you'd seen, because if the teachers heard about it they'd know you'd been down the tunnel where you shouldn't have been, and you'd be the one in trouble - and if they did find out that you knew about me, they'd bind you to secrecy as, in fact, they did. You were never supposed to get more than a - a bit of a fright which - well, which the others all thought was a big joke."

"Don't try to tell me that you did not. You were as eager as they were to _hound_ me, to bait me -"

The other man rubbed his eyes tiredly. "When we were younger I - it felt so great to be part of the pack, and designating someone else as an outsider made me feel even more like an _in_sider, you know?" Severus compressed his lips into a thin line and nodded curtly.

"But by fifth year I was a prefect, I didn't like the idea of luring somebody else to break the rules, although Sirius said if you took the bait that was your own fault - and I hated the idea of them playing up my own monstrousness in order to scare somebody else. But James said if I wanted - wanted company at full moon, we had to get you off my furry tail, and it seemed reasonable the way he explained it. But then Sirius decided that dead men tell no tales, and overrode the wards that were meant to confine me to the Shack... but I swear, I didn't know about that part until afterwards."

"One wonders what he proposed to do with the - the body. I wouldn't have thought any of you at that age had the knowledge or power to do a Lasting Transfiguration - were you supposed to eat me bones and all?"

Remus shuddered. "I don't think he thought that far ahead. I loved him, but even I can see that consecutive thought wasn't really his long suit."

"He dared me to go down there, you know."

"Yes; I remember you said. But you were mad to go down there in the dark to meet that - that thing, even if you did think that it - I - would be confined and not actually loose in the bloody tunnel."

Severus sighed wearily. "I didn't know. I thought - and everything which Black said encouraged me to think - that you were being taken to a secret location in Hogsmeade, and that the tunnel opened into the village. Which was true after a fashion, but..."

"But you hadn't expected the tunnel to go straight to the building I was kept in, and hit a dead end without ever coming up for air."

"Quite. Seeing the werewolf actually in the tunnel with me was - unexpected. To say the least."

"But you see, that's partly why I -"

"What?"

"Nymphadora, she -" He made an absent, frustrated gesture, tugging at the lock of light brown hair over his ear. "She wants us to marry, she bullied me into it, Severus, into sort-of agreeing but I - how can I let somebody I care for marry that?"

"Provided you take Wolfsbane -"

"But what happens, you tell me, what happens if the supply dries up, or it's faulty in some way? She says it'll never happen, that she's an Auror and she can restrain me if she has to, but I have nightmares about waking up next to a heap of bloody bones! And as for exposing a child to me -"

"That was why I had to tell the students - I thought you were in league with a murderer but in any case, after you failed to take your Wolfsbane -"

"You were right to, I think," Remus said, sounding depressed. "I wasn't really thinking straight at the time, what with - well, finding out about Sirius, and you trying to get him locked up again - I see now why you still thought he was guilty, but at the time I wasn't in the mood to be objective."

"You lot never bloody were, where I was concerned."

"That's pot calling the kettle Black, don't you think Severus? You may have been right - no, damnit, you _were_ right - to spill the beans about me after I'd ended up running around in the Forest drooling and endangering everybody, but you didn't have to bloody-well give the class _hints_ about me when I was taking Wolfsbane!"

"I had seen you smarming around Potter, and that same night Black broke into the castle, attacked the Fat Lady - what could I think but that you were helping Black to gain entrance, and setting Potter up to be killed? I couldn't warn him directly because I had promised Dumbledore never to betray your - _condition_ unless I had firm evidence that the condition itself was endangering others; but I hoped that Granger at least would work out what you were, and warn Potter that you were deceiving him."

"She did work it out - she warned him not to trust me when we were in the Shack. If I had been - what you thought - that might have protected him from me, to some extent. And I suppose -" He straightened his shoulders and gave Severus a bleak look. "I have no right to complain of you falsely accusing _me_, when I let Sirius suffer twelve years, twelve _years_ in Azkaban and never doubted his guilt -"

"I don't suppose you could have done anything at all to help him," Severus replied bitterly, "even if you'd known. It's not as if they let ordinary unimportant prisoners like him and me have visitors or, or post, even if I _hadn't_ been on the bloody total-isolation regime: and Black was supposed to be Public Enemy Number One."

"Sirius may not have been the son of a senior official, like Barty Crouch, but the fact that he was a Black might have got him visiting privileges: you know yourself, even a visit once a year to tell him somebody was working for him would have meant a lot. And even if not, maybe I could have done _something_, something like what we did for you - although using Dobby as an agent was really the product of Harry's warped imagination."

"And I'm grateful to the little sod, I really am." He pulled an irritated, tsk-ing face. "A bit of ingenuity is all it takes to manage your problem, as well. You can transform in a strong, locked cage every month - under the supervision of a Werewolf-Control Officer if you feel you need one - and Nymphadora can let you out once she's seen that the Wolfsbane has taken properly. And you can drink it under supervision, in front of witnesses - as you should have bloody done at Hogwarts."

"I think Albus vaguely assumed that you would supervise me - but there was no provision for what to do if we missed each other, and I can't think straight once the moon is up, even if I haven't changed yet."

"You're not thinking straight _now_. Much as I hate to admit it, Nymphadora is surprisingly competent, and if she's sure that she can handle you you shouldn't - shouldn't turn down the chance of love when it's offered to you. If you feel you can reciprocate, of course."

"I don't _know_ if I can reciprocate!" It was almost a wail. "She's - sweet and, and a lot more efficient than she likes people to know, yes, but I don't know if - how do I know if I even fancy her? Visually, I mean, I mean there is no 'her', visually, is there? Is the - the face we recognise as Dora actually her, or is it just like a favourite shirt she likes to wear?"

"If you were blind," Severus said softly, "you could still love her, without seeing her real face. If you can love her at all, that is."

"I don't know if I can or not. It's not - not my place to, is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know if - it just doesn't feel -"

"Wolves," Lynsey said, and they both looked at her, this time with attention rather than annoyance. "Only the dominant pair breed, only the dominant pair _pair_ - that's right, isn't it?"

"Yes I - I don't know if that's the problem but it doesn't feel right to me, to think of myself as a - 'the man of the house', you know?"

"How very old-fashioned of you," Severus said dryly.

"Yes, well," Remus snapped, "it's easy for you, isn't it? You've shacked up with a woman older than you, moved into her house - Dora's hardly older than a kid and she's going to expect me to be the, the family man -"

"I'm hardly a bloody Kept Man," Severus snarled; "not by bloody choice, anyway."

"I didn't mean it that way: just that you two - neither of you has to take the lead, do you? And I suppose Dora will expect me to, because I'm older, and I don't think I'm ready to. I've made a complete and utter balls-up of every responsibility I've ever been offered, so why should this be any different?"

"I cannot tell you whether you love her or not - unless you want me to Legilimise you? But if you need my permission as so-called alpha, I can give you that. Go and spawn if you feel you want to," he added rather ungraciously.

"Thank you," Remus replied, sounding depressed. "That does help, a bit. But even if - even if I was sure I wanted to, how can I ask someone who loves me to expose themselves to the - the public disgrace of being known to be in bed with a monster?"

"That is up to Miss Tonks herself, surely - she won't thank you for patronising her by protecting her from something she herself is sure she can handle."

"I suppose so..."

"I can read cards for you," Lynsey murmured. "If you like."

"Divination? Yes - maybe..."

"In my experience," Severus said, steepling his fingers, "and speaking as one who has taught her to NEWT level, Nymphadora is a solidly practical young woman and somewhat managing. She is, after all, a Black. She is also extremely fond of animals."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Lynsey tells me you make a very suitable pet when you're on Wolfsbane, and I'm sure any children you may have will be happy to play ball with Dads in the garden."

"Oh, that's just bloody brilliant, that is."

"I'm serious. More or less. So long as you take your potion punctiliously, she won't see your... alternative self as a monster, but as an amusing and, God help us, 'cute' variation on the theme of somebody she - for whatever reason - loves. She, after all, changes her face and figure as casually as her clothes: she won't feel that you have ceased to be you just because you have four legs and a tail."

"Without the Wolfsbane, I do become - something else. God, I hope that isn't me. The Ministry could cut off my supply in an instant if they decided to play rough - what will I do then if you can't -"

"Lock yourself in a cage overnight, as I said. But Hermione Granger is now competent to brew the Wolfsbane for you if - if I should become... unavailable."

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"Look at me, damn you!" the hoarse voice snarled, and Lynsey blinked awake in the cold dawn light to see Severus looming above her, his face twisting in distress and his eyes tight shut. "I'm here, I'm real, bastards, bastards, why won't you see me?"

She had feared, insofar as she had thought about it, that he might dream about being persecuted by the Marauders: but evidently it was the fragment of conversation about Azkaban with Remus which haunted his sleep. "Shhh," she murmured, hauling herself up sleepily to sit beside him and take his hand. "I'm here."

"Speak to me!" he gasped, his voice suddenly small and terrified. "Please, I don't want to die alone -"

"You're not alone, really you're not - Severus, wake up, it's just a dream." The nightshirt clung damply to his skin as she carefully gathered him into her arms and held him close.

"Lynsey -!" he said with another choking gasp, and she patted his back as if he were a child.

"That's right, good lad; you're here at home with me, you're not on your own, honest you're not."

"No - just-just white cold - nothing there - get me out of this, please, please get me out of this place -"

"Shhh," she said again, rocking him gently. "Brave lad, beautiful lad. Open your eyes for me, pet. This is real, and I'm real."

"I dreamed that I dreamed you," he said quietly with his face resting against her shoulder. "I dreamed that I had only dreamed Dobby coming to me, that the whole thing - all of it, being freed, being here with you, teaching combat, making love - it was all just a hallucination I was having, and I woke up from it and found that I was still chained to the bed in that horrible little white, empty room, facing a century or more of howling loneliness and sheer bloody unadulterated boredom. And how can I tell...?"

"I can't prove to you directly that I'm real, but, well - if you were going to _imagine_ being rescued, would you imagine being rescued by Harry and Remus and Neville and Dobby?"

"No..." he agreed with a sigh. "I suppose not. Longbottom's kindness to me especially was - something I couldn't even have dreamed of. Not to mention his competence, which was almost as unexpected."

He sat up, pulling away from her grasp, and began raking his knotted hair and crumpled nightshirt into order. "I dreamed about you when I was there," he said without looking at her, "but I didn't imagine that you could come for me... being a Muggle, I mean. I fantasised that Albus was alive and would come and save me, or that Minerva would somehow manage to send me her Patronus, through the wards, but a Patronus can't survive there - not when it was the Dementors' own stronghold, anyway. Even if a Patronus could find the bloody place, which I know that it could not."

"I was very impressed by your silver doe," Lynsey said. "I still like the horse best, but she's very lovely."

"_Lily_ was very lovely," he said shortly. "It's no credit to me."

"But surely - the Patronus is in some sense an expression of your soul, so even if the doe is a borrowed flag, your soul couldn't manifest as something so lovely unless there's a lot of loveliness in _you_." She supposed that by that token there must have been loveliness in Lily too - however loath she was to admit it of somebody who had abandoned him.

"If it's an expression of my soul, it's an expression of my loss and guilt and of a beauty I aspire to - not of something I actually possess."

"Whereas mine basically represents a desire to rip things' heads off."

"I wasn't going to say it."

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They dozed fitfully for an hour or so, before staggering blearily to the kitchen. Severus sat hunched over the breakfast table like a tousled rook, sucking up tea. "Combat training this morning," he said glumly, "and if I don't wake up sharpish I'm going to get my arse shot off."

"Maybe you should call in sick," Lynsey said, passing him the marmalade without being asked.

"Nah - if I took time off because I wasn't sleeping properly, I would never have made it to class."

"Well, I'm working from home today, so at least when you've finished I can make you a hot soup or something and put you to bed. It'll be nice. Or we could make up those automata, and get covered in glue, and then stick ourselves together in a compromising position and have to be rescued by paramedics."

He gazed at her quietly over the rim of his teacup. "That's something I hadn't expected," he said.

"What? Getting mothered? Being fancied madly?"

"Those, too. But what is so - remarkable is something I hadn't even considered or imagined: the idea that when I come home (and that's a novel concept in itself!) someone will be there who is pleased to see me. I mean, not just pleased that I haven't got myself killed yet, but actively pleased to have my company."

"You're very _good_ company, pet."

"Nobody else seemed to think so - except Lily, and she -" He looked down at his hands as if he'd never seen them before, examining the sharp ivory bones. "I was so... amazed, when Dobby came, not because you lot had found a way to make contact with me, but because you'd made the effort to try. Offhand I can't think of a single instance of anybody - not even Lily - putting themselves out for me before, unless they were paid to do it, like Poppy. At the time, I hardly realised it, it was just how things were, but I can see now..."

He gave her a rather desperate look. "Why was I so unimportant? To my father I was just a - a punch-bag, something to vent his perpetual rage on, and to Lucius and his cronies I was just reactive meat. I didn't exist, I was just - nothing. Even my own mother scarcely cared when Dads beat me, provided he didn't take his belt to her. And to the Marauders I was just - a toy. Like a wizarding chess-piece - something spelled to bleed and weep almost like a real person. Nothing that I wanted, no preference or pain of mine, had the slightest importance to anybody."

"It was probably nothing to do with you, pet, except coincidentally. Those sort of people, they're just people who can't relate properly to anybody else - everybody is meat to them, or a punch-bag, or a toy. You just happened to be handy. There's nothing wrong with you - only with them."

"But even to Albus - he was fond of me I think, at least as an adult, but I was still expendable. It doesn't matter how many excuses are made, he really didn't care that I'd almost been killed - down the tunnel, I mean. I didn't count for anything. Even my life could be thrown away, without thought or repercussion."

"Don't distress yourself, pet. Honestly, from what you and everyone else says about him, I think that he was so nerveless himself, or so careless of the possible alternative consequences of his actions, that he didn't think '_almost_ killed' mattered. He'd have grieved if you'd been really killed, I'm sure of it."

"You could be right - but I remain unconvinced. Why are you kind to me?"

"Huh. Because I'm a kind person. Because I am inordinately fond of you. Because you've suffered so much random, unearned cruelty in life that you deserve to have a lifetime's worth of random, unearned kindness to balance it up. And you're not unimportant to me, or to Remus or Minerva or funny old Horace - we would have burned the world to get you free, if we'd had to."

"God, that's - I'm not sure if that's reassuring or terrifying. Why now, when nobody much except Albus ever seemed to give a damn about me before?"

"I think perhaps he stood between you and the world too much. He protected you from harm - some sorts of harm, anyway, he protected you from open blame or suspicion - but his protection made a barrier which prevented you from interacting with people in your own right, instead of through him. It prevented you from forging independent connections with them - connections that were because of who you were and not because of who he was."

"God - what an age to begin again. It's like starting school all over again, only with bigger bullies. But can I ever be more than merely tolerated in wizarding society - with my background?"

"Being an ex Death Eater? But you're a hero now, and soon everyone will know it."

"You can't really be a hero in your own right if you're working class, in our world. You can only be comic relief - or some pure-blood's plucky sidekick! Whatever I do, to too many wizards I will always just be - low class. And now I'm a bloody jailbird who got off, the craven traitor who screamed for mercy and spilled what he knew - God knows how much they'd despise me if they knew what Lucius made of me! In fact I'm sure they're bloody speculating - even though, thank God, they only heard my end of the conversation which was mainly just 'Don't!'"

Lynsey winced, knowing how horrible it must be for him to have had what he saw as his humiliation made so public. "You know what they say, don't you?" she said brightly. "The people who matter don't mind, and the people who mind don't matter."

He grinned reluctantly at that. "Snobbery, Muggle-style?"

"Absolutely. Anybody who would despise you for being tortured and abused is themselves to be absolutely despised, and is therefore negligible: and anybody who worries about class, hasn't got it."

"So where do you fit into all this?"

"Me? My parents moved to Oban when I was twelve, but I was born London Irish, and that's a thing all by itself. As regards the British class system, you may say I'm an outside observer."

"My family were _not_ working class - as in, 'not working'. My father despised himself for being unemployed and unable to provide for his wife - although that was no fault of his, since there was no work to be had. Then he took to drink, and despised himself for that. Then I came along, wearing his face, and he saw himself in me and took out on me all his hatred of himself. I can see that now - in fact I think I half knew it then."

"Did that make it easier to cope with?"

"Not a lot. When you grow up being told that you're worthless all the time... The converse also applies of course: I hated him, I saw his face in me and so I hated myself. Though I realize now that my mother must take part of the blame. She could have reassured him when he first started to fret about not being a good breadwinner, but instead she undermined him at every turn. Not a very reassuring woman altogether, my mother. In fact - I've never quite dared to ask her about it, but I've a suspicion she poisoned him, in the end. She always was good with potions." He reached for the teapot and carefully poured himself another cup.

"Is she still alive, your mum?" He nodded in a rather subdued way. "Won't she want to - well, to see that you're all right?"

"I Floo-called her," he said shortly. "When I was staying at the Weasleys'. She had been - distressed, I do believe, when it was reported that I had been taken and tortured, and about - about Azkaban, and she was certainly quite relieved to hear that I was free and tolerably well. But she doesn't really do 'warm', and her sense of obligation towards me, such as it is, doesn't extend to actually socialising with me. If I'm alive and healthy and not actively under arrest, that's sufficient."

"You mean... she feels she has a duty to care about your well-being, at least on a physical level, but she doesn't actually like you much?"

"Quite. Of course, I don't like _her_ much, so I suppose it evens out."

"Well, _I_ like you," Lynsey said firmly. "And I blame her very much for allowing your father to physically abuse you."

"What could she do, though? She was afraid of him."

"I appreciate how it works for the normal run of battered wives - or battered husbands, for that matter - how they become hypnotized into thinking they're helpless and worthless, into thinking that they deserve it. But I find it hard to believe that that would apply to someone who _knew_ absolutely that only a legal technicality was preventing them from turning their attacker into a frog and stamping on him.

"And as a witch, surely she had access to far better escape routes than most battered wives? If she'd escaped with you into the wizarding world, how could he have found her? And you said yourself that you think she killed the old bastard, in the end - well, she could have offed him a lot sooner, to protect you rather than herself, rather than - rather than, it seems to me, only getting round to doing something about him when he had turned his attentions onto her because you were no longer around for him to batter."

"She didn't want to admit her mistake," he said, frowning. "My grandfather shocked the family by marrying a Muggle-born witch, so the only way Mums could prove how daring and iconoclastic she was was by going one better and screwing an actual Muggle - in a convenient alley after a local church social, I believe. When she fell pregnant with me - and later when she found out what dear Tobias was like as a life-partner - well, she didn't want to admit that the family had been right about him and she'd been wrong."

"Oh terrific - so she sacrificed you on the altar of saving face?"

"Yes. Basically. But she always did take after the Prince side, and that's a very... pure-blood thing to do. Even Narcissa has done it, and unlike my bloody mother she really does dote on Draco - but she still let Lucius alternately spoil and belittle him, rather than cause a scandal by walking out."

"But she probably really is too scared to run - he's a powerful wizard himself, so where could she go to, that he couldn't follow her?"

He cocked an eyebrow at her and gave her a bright, sceptical look. "You haven't met dear Narcissa, have you? She's very... sweet."

"Ah. As in, I always warn my male friends that any woman over the age of about eighteen who comes on strongly as 'sweet little me' is either mentally retarded or up to no good?"

"Cissy may not be entirely stable - but she's fairly bright."

"But - you said yourself that you were afraid of what Lucius might do to her if he found out that you and she..."

"True. If he was provoked into rage against her he might do any bloody thing, including murder. But in the normal way of things she has him wrapped firmly around her little finger. Narcissa definitely wears the trousers in that relationship - sometimes literally, I believe."

"Too much information. Way, _way_ too much information."

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On Friday he came home in a state of some excitement, to announce that Harry's house-elf, Kreacher, had managed to steal back the Horcrux-bearing locket, which Mundungus had fenced to a very unpleasant woman who worked for the Ministry. The dishonesty involved was, in Severus's considered opinion, counterbalanced by the fact that a) Mundungus had stolen the locket in the first place, and b) the Ministry official, Dolores Umbridge, had extorted it from Mundungus with menaces.

"Mind you," he added, flopping down on the sofa in a flurry of black and putting his feet up on the coffee table, "Potter said that Kreacher had been holding it in trust for Regulus Black, who stole it from the - from Riddle, who nicked it and the Hufflepuff cup from an elderly collector, who herself had bought it from a Dark Arts curio shop, who had conned it out of Riddle's mother Merope when she was desperate, who had nicked it from her Dads, who had it legitimately from Salazar. Merope had some legitimate claim to it because her father owed her something for two decades of unrewarded drudgery, and she was cheated out of it, so I suppose Riddle really did have a right to it - but he murdered the collector to make a Horcrux, rather than just reclaiming what was his."

"What a saga. It doesn't sound like a lucky thing, does it?"

"It never was. Godric gave it to Salazar, with a lock of his own hair inside, as a make-up present: but they still parted. I, uh, don't mean _that_ sort of makeup..."

Definite progress was being made: Argus Filch, who held Severus in some kind of awe even though Severus privately called him "a creepy old would-be pervert who makes my skin crawl", had agreed to lend his Probity Probe to Kreacher for a few days, and Kreacher was going to make a sweep of the Come-and-Go room over the weekend. Severus himself had been neglecting Lynsey all week in favour of poring through sinister-looking tomes - some retrieved from the lake, some from his own private collection from behind the panel on the left of the fireplace in his quarters at Hogwarts - and making scratchy, angular notes on a loose-leaf pad. He had tried recording his findings on the laptop, but after it had spontaneously rebooted itself three times, and the mouse-cursor had begun to move about on its own, he had decided that pen and paper was safer.

[Some of the more exciting volumes had to be kept zipped up in Severus's old carpet-bag when not in use, in order to keep the cats away from them - and not to protect the books. The bookcase he had ordered included a glass-fronted section for that reason.]

"The problem is," he said irritably, tapping his quill against the page, "that often the actual spell-words are given in riddles or mnemonics, rather than um _spelled out_ plainly, and the gestures are anybody's guess. The usual method when reconstructing spells from old texts is to make some informed guesses and then try them out and see what works - but I can hardly try _this_."

All this activity was not before time, for the news from the wizarding world was bad. There had been several successful attacks by Voldemort's forces, some of them especially targeted at undermining Ministry control, and it had been discovered that somebody at the Ministry had infiltrated the system used to monitor the Floo network, and had set up a chain of unregistered Floo-points which had not yet been traced.

On other fronts, Lynsey had admitted to her other friends and family that she had a bidey-in, who was, she informed them, a security consultant whom she had met during the witch-moot in Croydon. His name she gave as Gordon Mercer, on the grounds that this had nothing at all to do with his real one: if it ever became possible to use the name "Severus" in public, she would probably tell them it was his Principality or fannish handle.

Severus had agreed to have lunch with a group of her friends next week, wearing the glamour which made him harder to memorise. Lynsey overcame his reluctance by reminding him of Alan Breck's maxim: once her friends thought they knew enough about him, even if it was mostly lies, they would stop asking and lose interest; but if they knew they didn't know, they would keep on digging until they found something inconvenient.

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Over the weekend, they put up the bookcases which Severus had bought, so that he could unpack Albus's silver instruments from their little brass-bound chest. From what he said, they were mostly prediction machines - a sort of artificially-psychic magical computer, or a mechanical Tarot - and their power-usage was circumscribed enough not to register to an outside observer.

One of the shelves had a rough, poorly-finished patch where fibres of wood had protruded through the varnish. Lynsey fetched sandpaper from the cupboard and had rubbed the offending area smooth before she noticed that Severus was watching her hands fixedly, his throat working and his skin the colour of porridge.

"What is it, pet?"

"Macnair," he said thickly: "after he tore out my nails the raw surface was so - exquisitely sensitive and he -" He looked away, swallowing convulsively. Feeling as queasy as he looked, Lynsey put her hand on his shoulder and he leant against her touch, quietly.

She wondered, sometimes, about her own position. There was certainly a level on which she enjoyed the closeness which was created between them when she comforted him through his trauma; she hoped that that didn't mean that there was a deeper level on which she actually wanted him to be traumatised.

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Opportunities for that sort of closeness were certainly plentiful. During the day he might be combat-master and strategist-in-chief to the Order of the Phoenix, and by night an enthusiastic if still rather nervous lover; but in the small hours of the morning the memories of torture and bleak isolation, of his miserable childhood and hunted teens, of Lily's murder and of the things he did and saw both as Death Eater and as spy paraded through his sleeping mind, leaving him sweating and shaking in Lynsey's arms. And they both knew that it wasn't going to get much easier anytime soon: she could help him to feel better and stronger about himself, and she meant to, but there was no quick cure for the horrors in his head.

Sometimes when he was racked by memory she could get him out of it with song, or with poetry, usually Hopkins or Yeats: holding his hands and murmuring "'Though I am old with wandering / Through hollow lands and hilly lands'..." until the hypnotic cadence steadied his breathing and drew him down into peaceful sleep. Or at least got him calm enough to benefit from a cuddle.

She had not been sure, at first, whether _Coisich a Ruin_ - the very song she had used to free him from the Unnameable One's torture-room in the first place - would calm him or freak him out completely: whether it would taste to him of salvation or of torment. But in fact he seemed to find it soothing - provided she sang it quite slowly and wistfully, rather than with the hard crash and thump which she had used to break through his howling agony, on the cold cusp of the year.

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"I can't - I don't - please - no -"

She had grown used to coping with his night-time terrors, almost without waking up herself: but it was new for him to fall into a flashback when he was up and dressed. Some pattern of shadows across the wall, some grisly item in the _Prophet_, had caused him to fall into the well of memory, and left him staring wild-eyed at something invisible to her.

She crossed the room and sat down on the floor by his feet, so as not to loom over him, and laid her hand on his arm - carefully, without gripping. She could feel the muscles jumping under his skin. "Come on, pet," she said quietly, and he moved his head stiffly to look at her, his gaze dragging back into focus from a great distance. He opened his mouth to speak, but could not force his throat to cooperate.

She gave the arm a gentle pat and shifted to sit with her side pressed against his leg, looking away from him. "'I caught this morning morning's minion,'" she began quietly, "'king/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his riding / Of the rolling level underneath him steady air and striding / High there,'" and Severus's soft, dark voice cut across her: "'Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer'".

"Trust you to find a way to put a sinister spin on it," she replied with profound relief.

"'Things fall apart;'" he went on determinedly; "'the centre cannot hold'. _I'm_ falling apart. Or-" He covered his face with his hands. "Ordinarily I can use Occlumency to keep them, the flashbacks, out, at least when I'm awake - but some of those books that Dumbledore had, you read them and they read you _back_, and it's undermining me, feeble fucking idiot - promise me you won't try to look at them without my supervision!" he added sharply.

"I promise, pet." In fact, she'd already flicked through several of them, carefully bypassing the ones which gave her the cold grue just from looking at the spines, or which actually smoked; but there was no point in worrying him. "And you're not being feeble, you're really not - it's impressive that you can block flashbacks at all."

"But I shouldn't bloody-well have them in the first place. Not everyone does, do they? - and my mind is supposed to be disciplined, I'm meant to be able to direct my thoughts, my memories: I wouldn't have lasted ten minutes as a spy if I couldn't. And it's not as if - as if I hadn't been - tortured - before and, all right, I had dreams, but they didn't spill into my waking life: so why now?" He twisted his hands together, beginning to claw at his own skin. "It's not just the books it's - I can feel myself walking on a knife-edge."

"Don't," she said, taking hold of his hands and stilling them. "Look, it's like, two people can be in a car accident and one walks away with minor cuts and bruises and the other ends up with a broken back, but it's not weakness that broke the guy's back, just the luck of the draw - and once it's happened, he can't just unmake it happen and get up and walk through sheer willpower. It's done, and you have to deal with it, and you can deal with it - but you can't make it not have happened in the first place."

"But that is referring to - physical injury. That's a very different matter from not being able to control my own bloody _mind_."

"Yes but it _is_ a physical injury, sort-of. As I understand it, what seems to happen is that sometimes, during an acutely traumatic experience, especially a life-threatening one, there's a rush of stress-hormones so intense that it disrupts the hippocampus - the bit of the brain which controls the filing-system for memory. Then that particular memory doesn't get attached to the temporal framework properly, and instead of being stored as Then it becomes permanently tagged as Now and keeps floating to the surface as if it had just happened, or is still happening. Kind-of like a film slipping off its little ratchetty things and not winding on properly. There's nothing much you can do about it except ride it out and wait for the filing-system to sort itself out - which does usually happen eventually, but can take years - or learn lucid-dreaming techniques which enable your present self to get into the memory and override the past self enough to calm it down."

"Lucid dreaming - that's - a bit like the astral work you showed me, isn't it?"

"Mmm, except in your sleep rather than a waking trance. It's becoming conscious within the dream and knowing that you are dreaming, or within a flashback and knowing that it is one, and then walking about in it and directing it, yes, a bit like astral visualisation. It's possible to learn it... and, well, maybe it would help you to join a discussion group on the net for victims of torture or, um..."

"Yes." The difficult word "rape" was understood without saying it. "But I don't suppose they have internet discussion lists for abused wizards: and if I went on a Muggle list I'd have to be always watching what I said, in case they thought I was mad, or taking the piss."

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The next day was a Monday, and Severus came home from work in a state of high excitement, to announce that Kreacher had identified several suspicious objects which might be Horcruxes. Remus was with him, having decided, he said, to take Lynsey up on her offer of a reading.

"Believe it or not," Severus said happily, "we think it may be that tiara - the one that was on that bust near where we found the, um, the centaur figurines."

"A tiara? Isn't that a bit girly for Tom Riddle to store a bit of his immortal soul in?"

"It's still got to be authenticated," Remus said, "but it looks as though it may be a missing Ravenclaw artefact. It will be a shame if we have to destroy it."

"No more so than if we have to destroy Salazar's locket," Severus muttered, and Remus pulled a rueful face.

"I suppose so."

"I found something myself that I think will interest you," Lynsey said. She hadn't intended them to have an audience for this, but instinct told her that it would be all right. "You remember I told you that when we were in the caves, and you turned the tables and hunted Riddle's lot right back, I saw you as a great black fox?"

"_Did_ she now?" Remus murmured to himself, watching Severus with lively interest in his amber eyes.

"What of it?" Severus said warily.

Lynsey fished out the old-fashioned LP and put it on the turntable, carefully lowering the needle into the smooth blank stripe before the song she wanted. "Listen to this."

The springy, striding tune told of a party of foxhunters who set out on horseback but could find no fox to run for them, until the master cried:

"'... I will have my chase,  
And if only the Devil himself came by  
We'd run him such a race.'

And then there sprang like lightning  
A fox from out his hole:  
His fur was the colour of a starless night,  
His eyes like burning coals."

Lynsey watched Severus out of the corner of her eye, and saw a scowl warring with a faint but definite self-satisfied smirk, as the song detailed the fox's prowess and stamina, until it turned, laughing, and cried to its exhausted persecutors:

"'Ride on my gallant huntsmen:  
When must I come again?  
Oh never shall you want for a fox  
To chase all over the plain,

And when your need is greatest,  
Just call upon My Name:  
I will come and you shall have  
The best of sport and game.'

All the men looked up in wonder;  
All the hounds ran back to hide;  
For the fox had changed to the Devil himself  
Where he stood at the other side."

Severus started uneasily, and the smirk relocated itself to Remus's face.

"And men and hounds and horses  
Went flying back to town,  
And hard on their heels came a little black fox,  
Laughing as he cried:

'Ride on my gallant huntsmen:  
When must I come again?'..."

As the song wound down to its conclusion, her professor ducked his head, letting his hair swing down in curtains. "I appreciate the thought," he said awkwardly, "and your less-than-subtle attempt to make me feel better about my part in the whole miserable bloody affair, but being compared to the Devil is... too apt for comfort."

Lynsey pulled a face. "I was forgetting you were Catholic, and I didn't mean to imply you were evil. The song - well, it's not exactly traditional but it does incorporate bits of a traditional story, and in British folk tradition, especially here in Scotland, the Devil tends to be portrayed more as a sort of Trickster figure - as a folk-hero, witty and clever and only a little bit sinister."

"Speaking as an official Dark Creature," Remus said lightly, "I'll buy that."

"If I was - like that," Severus said, "I mean witty and so on, _there_, it was because I was borrowing it from you. You were the strong one and I was - abject, pleading, and what does that make me?"

"Your memory is defective: even though you were in a very bad state physically and psychologically, you behaved with massive courage and competence. He really did," she added as an aside to Remus, and he nodded firmly.

"I wouldn't have picked him for an alpha if I didn't think he was competent and brave," he murmured.

"And we bolstered each other: I would have been paralysed with terror if I'd been on my own. Anyway," she added in the face of his bitter, sceptical expression, "isn't it rather sexist of you to worry about the fact that a woman might be stronger than you?"

"She's got you there, Severus!" Remus said with a grin.

"I didn't mean it like that!" he protested. Lynsey didn't give him time to explain what he _had_ meant, since the object was to wrong-foot him out of his self-doubt.

"In any case, I'm older than you - I'm allowed to play Big Sister without calling your touchy masculine pride into question. And you saved me many times over in the caves - you're the only person I know that's strong enough for me to lean on. It's right that you should have somebody to lean on too."

"When I was a kid," Severus muttered, "before Hogwarts I mean, the PE teacher got us to do that trust thing where you fall back and the person behind catches you, but the boy who was supposed to catch me didn't. He thought it was a big laugh. And I never - I hoped it could be different, but I never had any hope that it would be, if that makes sense."

"From now on," Remus said seriously, "if it's humanly or, in my case, semi-humanly possible, when you fall, someone will be there to catch you."

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Remus joined them for dinner: a circumstance about which Severus was uneasily polite; embarrassed, Lynsey supposed, by the sentimentality of the other man's assurance, or doubting its sincerity. Afterwards, she fetched out her deck and laid out the Shining Star spread: once for the future of the relationship between Remus and Tonks - which was imperfect, but tolerable - and once for how Remus himself should approach the matter. Severus pretended uninterest, but Lynsey caught him watching intently out of the corner of his eye.

"On the emotional level, Mourning - that's emotional lability and, um, self-pity" - she ignored Severus's delicate snort - "and The Horse Thief reversed - 'unfounded fears repel success'. That means the cards think that what you're pitying yourself about is an unfounded fear, which is good news really, so they're telling you to stoppit."

"These aren't normal cards, are they?" Remus asked, squinting at the little cardboard picture which showed a bare-chested, long-haired man in a species of maroon half-cloak, leading a grey horse. "What would that be in a regular deck?"

"Seven of Swords. This is the Native American deck - I like it because it's, well, brutally honest. A lot of modern decks, they've been bowdlerised so you can hardly get a bad reading, but this one doesn't so much do character assessments as character assassinations."

"Lovely," the werewolf replied balefully. "Just what I wanted."

"And..." She turned over another card. "There we are: on the mental level, which is how you _think_ about the situation, you've got The Warrior of Vessels - that's, um, quite a good card for a relationship in some ways because it can mean luck in romance, and being quick to respond to physical attraction, but it also means problems with lack of staying-power in romance" - depending on context, on the Physical axis it could also mean erectile dysfunction, but she kept that bit to herself - "poor management of one's affairs, over-sensitivity to external influence and, um, factors to do with possible mental illness or drugs, which in your case probably means the werewolf-thing."

That was putting a much politer gloss on it than the deck itself did: the little booklet which came with the pack spoke of possible schizophrenia, certain weakness of character and probable disaster, but the strongest meaning of the cards was not always the correct one.

"You make me sound like a hopeless case," Remus muttered, and she could hear resentment and anger warring with self-doubt under the peaceful facade.

"I wouldn't say that - see, here's the other mental-axis card now, and it's The World. That means you need to buckle down and put some serious work into the relationship, to _think_ about it as a piece of work that you can do, and as a thing which won't work unless you work: but the good news is that the cards clearly think that you can do it if you try. This means that through your hard work you can obtain your goal and move the situation on and up to a higher level. With more and harder work to come, of course, but always progressing, and achieving something well worth the effort."

Breathing an inward sigh of relief - with the fangs that this deck had, it could have been so much worse - she gave him a reassuringly professional smile. "Despite some 'issues'" - she winced as she turned over The Journey reversed, the inner void, on the Spiritual level - "it's clear the cards think that you and Tonks have the potential to be a going concern."

And in the end, through all their problems, there was Strength at the heart.

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"Now that you've finished fussing over that damn' sheep-botherer..."

"You were jealous? That's sweet!"

"Huh. No, not jealous, just..."

"Feeling a bit neglected?"

"Mmm."

"Well, c'mere then and let me un-neglect you for a bit."

She had already learned that the main thing about Severus and sex was not to do anything _suddenly_ - there were a lot of forms of touch which he was perfectly OK about if he was forewarned, but which freaked him out if he wasn't expecting them. And tentative and uncertain though he still was, he was easier about touching her, about pleasing her, than about being pleased.

He was tautly eager to explore her body himself with careful lips and fingertips, so long as she made the first move, and what he lacked in experience he more than made up for in dexterity and application; but when Lynsey found herself conveniently placed to trail her tongue experimentally along the underside of his erection, and did so, he jerked and shuddered. "God - don't -"

"I'm sorry," she said, and cursed herself for moving too fast; she had thought he had been aroused enough to just go with it. "If you don't want -"

"It's not - not that I don't like it," he said unsteadily.

Lynsey propped herself up on her elbows on the bed, watching his blanched, nervy face from a necessarily low angle, since her head was now about level with the pale rack of his lower ribs. "What, then?"

"I just - it makes me feel -" He winced, and muttered: "Don'twanttofeelI'mbeinglikeLucius."

Blast - she should have thought of that. "The fact that Lucius likes certain things," she said delicately, "done by unwilling partners, doesn't mean that you can't do them with somebody who's extremely willing to. But if it freaks you out, or, or reminds you of stuff -"

He sighed irritably. "Everything to do with sex 'reminds me of stuff', and I said I wasn't going to let that put me off, didn't I? But if you - do things for me, sexually I mean, instead of _vice versa_, it makes me feel as if I am... taking advantage, like him."

Lynsey frowned at him. "Look, if I want to, to please you that doesn't mean I'm being meek, placating you - what's to placate? I'm far too good at managing your moods to need to go to so much effort - sorry, but it's true and you know it."

Severus made a little huffing noise at that, and heaved himself upright to sit with his back against the headboard. "Why, then?"

Lynsey had to sit up on the bed herself, facing him, in order to continue to see his face without getting a cricked neck. "Because I like to do nice things for you - because I care about you, and because you deserve to have nice things done for you, and it _pleases_ me to do nice things for you."

He flinched away from her, snarling like a dog. "I don't want to be anybody's bloody pity-fuck." He visibly thought about that for a moment. "Well, not unless it's the only kind of fuck on offer..."

"Tish. Quite apart from asking what's wrong with giving and taking a little kindness, it's way more complicated than that. Thinking about somebody dear to me being hurt, it tears me up, it makes me hot and miserable - so putting things right for you puts them right for me too."

"Am I, then?" he asked in an odd voice.

"Are you what?"

"Dear to you."

"Oh, immensely. And I also fancy you immensely, so doing things that give you pleasure really pleases me too, I get a buzz from it. It's very - erotic. It's a bit like tickling the cats under the chin until they go all purry and ecstatic - and you know how weirdly satisfying that is - but so much more intense."

"You don't feel - you don't feel that it means I am - controlling you?"

"Oh, no - quite the reverse. There's a definite sense of power in making you purr like a cat - but you don't need to feel threatened by that, because you must know I'd rather die than use that power to hurt you."

"I do know, more or less - and in any case I'd far rather it were that way round, that you have power over me, than feel that I was - that I was doing Lucius's work for him. Being his proxy, an extension of him, of his control over me."

"Oh, but, look, I've told you - it's what you feel about it emotionally that matters, not the purely physical bit." She wondered how long it was going to take to give him back to himself - if it were even possible to do so. He had considered himself to be someone else's property, one way or another, for nearly all his life. "You might feel the, the same physical sensation as he did: any man might. But as I understand it, Lucius wanted other people to do him sexual favours because he wanted to feel he was dominating them - he likes to feel he's forcing himself on someone who's revolted by him, doesn't he?"

"Oh yes. At least - it was more complicated than that, in my case." He looked away from her, staring into the private distance of memory. "In the beginning - when I was twelve and he was seventeen, he would have called what he did to me seduction, and there was perhaps some truth in that, at first. I was just so - so fucking starved for any kind of attention that didn't involve being hit and this didn't. At first. And I was just at that idiotic age to have same-sex crushes, and Lucius was so - he shone."

He moved his head restlessly, shaking something off, before meeting Lynsey's eyes again. "They say there's some Veela in that bloodline, and I could believe it. I suppose he was flattered to be the object of such wide-eyed devotion from such a, a little black scrap of a thing, and I was flattered beyond measure when he responded."

"It was still abusive, though - you were so much younger, he must have known you were too young even to know what your sexual preferences were going to be."

"I was too young even to understand that I would _have_ preferences, and he knew how - idiotically _needy_ I was, and played on it. Later on -" He stared down at his clasped hands, gripping and twisting them together until the knuckles shone palely through his skin. "The older we got, the worse he got, the more he liked to, to humiliate me, to keep me down in the dirt, and the more I knew I didn't want him - touching me. Him or his bloody creepy friends. The more I started fancying girls, yus kin - the more I knew what fancying people felt like and that what they were doing to me wasn't it! But I suppose he still thought... He always liked an, an _unequal_ relationship, I being so much the younger, and he thought he was really being so bloody generous, lowering himself to touch half-blooded trash like me. He really did. It came as a great shock to him, I think, to discover not only that I was a traitor to the Cause but that I had despised him for years - and then he wanted to, to degrade me - that way, to obliterate me as a sentient being even, to punish me for showing himself to himself in such a poor light."

"And that's without even knowing that you were shagging his wife..." Lynsey murmured, with the slightly hysterical ghost of a laugh.

"God, no. I was very tempted to tell him - he could hardly be any more vicious than he was already being, and revenge would have been sweet - but God knows what he would have done to Cissy if I had."

"Well, you don't bloody want to dominate or degrade people that way, do you? You want to feel desired, accepted, wanted - it's not the same thing at all."

"And what do you want, Lynsey?"

"In bed, you mean? To be absolutely close - without any barriers. To cherish somebody I care for. To touch and be touched in that - that immensely electrically tactile way that's like stroking the cats raised to the _n_th power. Somebody to cuddle - and to warm my feet on." She shifted her position, so she could use the toes of her left foot to stroke him delicately in a sensitive spot. "To have a bit of a laugh at what is, basically, a very silly activity."

"Oh, God - the last thing I want to do in bed is feel _silly_, can't you understand that?" Nevertheless, she could feel his fleshy heat pressing against the sole of her foot as his body began to respond.

"But is there a choice?" Using her foot instead of her hand was difficult, almost a meditation exercise, and she leaned back and half shut her eyes in concentration. "Listen, this friend of mine, she was making love with her husband when their enormous and very jealous cat wandered in and landed spread-eagled on the poor guy's back with all her claws out at a moment of sexual crisis and you can't tell me _that's_ not silly. Or there was -" she grinned at him as she felt him begin to wriggle at her touch "- there was this couple in I think the Thirties, making love in an orchard, and they were planning to, um, 'Get off at Haymarket' as they say in Edinburgh, only an apple fell off the tree and thwacked the poor guy on the backside just as he was, um, about to - dismount, and he very nearly went through to Waverley. When I told my mum about that one, she said it proved God has a sense of humour."

Severus gave a whoop of laughter so sudden and sharp that he made himself cough. When he had got his breath back he gasped "I am never, never even _trying_ it again unless you make sure the cats are out of the room - and you can stop that and go and shut the damn' door to keep them out, since you're obviously feeling so lively!"

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Later, lying in darkness with the taste of him in her mouth, and idly doodling a pattern on his bare forearm with her fingernail, she asked, "Did you never think of going to your house-master about what Lucius was doing?"

"To Horace Slughorn - when the Malfoys had so much influence? I don't know..." He shifted restlessly, making the duvet rustle. "Maybe he really would have helped me - I'd like to believe him - but I was just so bloody embarrassed. I really believed what Lucius told me, that I deserved everything I got. In the end I just did whatever he told me - it was easier that way. Even when he - even when he still wanted to, to _see_ me after he left school." He grinned suddenly, showing a flash of uneven teeth in the darkened room. "Later on, of course I had an... ulterior motive, since seeing Lucius meant, um, seeing Narcissa..."

"Devious smug bastard," Lynsey said affectionately, and Severus made a little huff of amusement.

"As Head of Slytherin, I'd be letting the side down if I wasn't at least _moderately_ smug and devious."

"I remember you said Slytherins were selected for ambition - but there seems to be a lot of, um, inter-house rivalry?" She had certainly got that impression from some of the undertones to the conversations between him and Remus.

"All the time. There are four houses. Slytherins are supposed to be selected because their dominant characteristic is ambition; Ravenclaws for disinterested intellectual curiosity; Gryffindors for bravery - although often that translates to arrogant bravado - and Hufflepuffs for diligence and loyalty, although in practice Hufflepuff gets anybody who didn't fit into one of the others. Which, to put it at its crudest, means psychopaths and abuse-survivors in Slytherin, high-function autistics in Ravenclaw, narcissists, schizophrenics and manic-depressives in Gryffindor and Hufflepuff gets the ones who've already given up."

"It's not that bad, surely?"

"The wizarding world is a very small, inbred population - if it wasn't for Muggle-borns like Granger and, and Lily, and half-bloods like me, they'd all be barking mad by now. And all the houses, all of them, they compete, they try to best each other, but the rivalry between Slytherin and Gryffindor is especially bitter, and _all_ the other houses unite against us. Whoever is playing Slytherin, the other two houses always support the other team. And the staff - well, most of the staff went to Hogwarts themselves, and they tend to reproduce the same biases they had as children."

"Ouch. Why are they so hostile?"

"Historical reasons, partly. There were four original Founders, one for each house, but Salazar, the Founder of Slytherin, he quarrelled with the others over their admissions policy, among other things. He felt that taking Muggle-borns into the school was tantamount to kidnapping them - this was in the eleventh century, when neither Muggles nor wizards had fast long-distance travel or communications, remember. At that time - well, people lived widely-spaced, it was easier to conceal magic then, so the need to hive ourselves off in a separate community was less pressing. Binnsey claims that it was nevertheless a period of great persecution of magical folk, but I suspect he's overstating the case."

"Well - the main witch-persecutions weren't for centuries. There were _some_, I think - but most Christian churches at that time didn't even believe in magic, as far as I know."

"That's what I thought. It would have been enough to send emissaries to warn Muggle-borns not to do it in public - as it were. There was little pressing need to take them out of their local culture and into ours, other than the desire to indoctrinate them and to control all magic."

"Ah. A bit like the Roman church absorbing the Celtic church." She snuggled up comfortably against his side, which smelt faintly sweaty after their recent exertions, and he hooked his arm round her and gave her elbow an absent-minded pat.

"Quite. The other Founders thought that there was a sort of One True Faith - or rather a One True Way of Doing Magic - and they wanted to make sure that everybody who could do strong magic, learned to do it the Hogwarts way. They wanted to prove they could do it better than the College of Warlocks at Dún Scáith in Skye."

"The Fortress of Shadows? Do you mean Scáthach was one of your people?" She craned her head round to look at him interestedly, although all she could really see was his hawk profile, a sharp black cut-out outlined against the relative pallor of the curtains and the faint glow of streetlights beyond.

"Mmm. The stories say she wasn't entirely human, but she was certainly a witch! The magic she and her successors taught was... wild, and most of it was used for combat. The Founders had a theory that magic would work better and be more... well, that if magic was harnessed and controlled by organised spells, then its effects would be safer, more predictable: easier to conceal from Muggles, and more accessible to the less able."

"You mean... people who only had a little bit of magic could still produce a specific effect, and know what they were getting, by using the right ritual - um, spell-words?"

"Rather than doing it by exerting raw force and shaping it with 'will and wand', yes, in the way that an adept like Dumbledore can do, where what you get depends heavily on how powerful you are. Their argument had a lot of merit: the problem came in when the other three wanted everybody to _only_ learn formal, spell-based magic. Salazar thought that we shouldn't restrict magic to only the one branch, or seek to impose wizarding culture on others: but he also thought that, well, that wizarding culture shouldn't be diluted by too many outsiders, either, and that was where the problems came from."

"Ah. I can see how that might be... taken the wrong way."

"Mmm. As far as I know he really did value Muggle culture as well, he wanted to preserve the characteristic oddities of their culture and of his own in a Ravenclawish, anthropological sort of way, and he thought that if we were going to take in newcomers at all it should be done carefully and they should be taught our ways: but subsequent generations took him to mean we shouldn't take in Muggle-borns at all."

"You mean, he was thinking 'Don't sell TV sets to the natives, we mustn't corrupt their pure tribal culture' in that slightly patronising but well-meaning, PC sort of way, but his successors turned it into an excuse for apartheid?"

"Exactly. The irony was that he and Godric Gryffindor were lovers - although Salazar must have been bi, since he had a son - but anyway Godric took the fact that Salazar disagreed with him very badly, as a betrayal rather than a difference of opinion, and when Salazar upped sticks and went to work at Dún Scáith instead, Godric accused him of having had a secret lover there all along. There was a lot of bitterness and recrimination, and Salazar's real message ended up being distorted - _he himself_ ended up distorting it in order to annoy Godric, I think."

"Oh dear - people tend to forget that important historical figures could be just as silly as anybody else."

"Quite. People portray Salazar as this brooding dark mastermind -"

"A sort of camp James Bond villain, plotting world domination with a white Persian cat on his lap?"

"Mmm. But reading between the lines, I suspect he was a lot like Hagrid - basically good-hearted but excitable and a bit bigoted, and prone to fits of the sulks. He even collected pet monsters! Even his interest in preserving the pure-blood line was a spin-off of his interest in breeding miniature dragons for use as guard-dogs. But nobody wants to know that. Slytherin House wants to think that their Founder was, well, not exactly an evil genius, but..."

"All suave and slinky and romantically brooding?"

"Exactly - not a, a funny little bloke from Norfolk with a face like a leathery apple, who trained Jarveys to catch ducks for him, and tied his clothes together with string. And Gryffindor wants to think that he was the sinister friend-turned-enemy who betrayed the noble, high-minded Godric: not that both of them acted like a pair of sulky hormonal teenagers. But at any rate Salazar became the pure-bloods' Poster Boy. Slytherin House developed a culture of exclusion, of rarely if ever taking on Muggle-borns, and not being that keen on half-bloods like me either, although I didn't know that in advance.

"You see it's not - the Hat doesn't only Sort on the dominant personality trait: a lot of students would be suited to more than one house, or none, and then the Hat makes decisions based on the student's personal preference, or on where their family went before them, or sometimes just to even up the numbers. Because nearly all the Muggle-borns and half-bloods went to other houses, the Hat sorted a disproportionate number of the witch-born to Slytherin to balance the numbers, and then of course a lot of children from those old pure-blood families who didn't want to associate with trash like me or Lily chose to be in Slytherin..."

"Ah."

"Quite. Even though many Slytherins were simply Sorted on the basis of ambition, and many of their ambitions were selfless - to cure disease or to feed the poor, or understand the true nature of time - the other houses thought that we were _all_ bigots and ruthless climbers, and that - isolation, that sense of being unfairly accused, gave the bigots more power to make converts.

"Not that we _were_ all bigots, even in - in Riddle's day. Horace, for example, has his own prejudices, but he's completely free of house bias, and he tries hard not to care about blood-status: if anything he favours Muggle-borns and half-bloods, in order to be certain of not being the bigot he was probably raised to be."

"He's a dodgy bleeder, that much is obvious, but I rather like him."

"Yes. It was because of Horace that I wanted to be in Slytherin in the first place. I was always interested in potions, and when Mums was in one of her chatty moods she told me that the Potions master at Hogwarts was the Head of Slytherin and that he didn't care about blood-status or class, if you had talent - he could advance the careers of clever boys even if they were ugly little buggers like me."

He sighed heavily in the darkness. "And I wanted - not just the career, but I _wanted_ so much so have a, a father figure who would encourage my interests, instead of trying all the time to crush me. And he did - he let me have the use of a lab., when I was older, and he invited me to join the Slug Club as soon as he saw that I had real ability. The only problem with that was that the junior members were overseen by the older ones - he thought it built a supportive network, and I suppose for many it did, but it put me in Lucius's path. But Horace was fool enough to be taken in by Tom Riddle, so I suppose it's not surprising he didn't see through Lucius's dubious charms."

"Was Riddle in the Slug Club?"

"I don't actually know - I don't even know if the Slug Club existed in the forties - but he was a Slytherin, and I know that he charmed Horace into giving him valuable information about the Dark Arts." He shifted uneasily again. "That's another problem - another black mark the other houses hold against us. Because Salazar himself believed that magic was a broad church and that authorised spells and potions shouldn't be all there was to it, the climate in Slytherin was always more favourable to those students who were interested in... alternative magic. Including the Dark Arts."

"What does that mean, exactly? If I say 'black magic' I mean magic used for selfish or harmful ends, but it sounds as though you mean an actual class of magic."

"It doesn't mean anything _exactly_ - the term is used widely and sloppily and is often applied, as you say, to any magic which is harmful. That's part of the problem - the other houses associate Slytherin with Dark Arts and they associate Dark Arts with evil which - which isn't necessarily true. They are always dangerous, but... they feed on external energy, from a person or from - I suppose you'd call it astral forces or something - or from the environment. They are - mutable, protean, ridden and directed by will..." Lynsey could hear the edge of longing in his voice.

"But in the wrong hands - even sometimes in the right ones - they can be very dangerous. Wounds made with Dark curses are often slow or impossible to heal, because the curse sucks energy out of the subject to perpetuate itself - it's self-perpetuating rather than self-limiting. It's easy for the caster to become - drunk, after a fashion, on the energies involved, and that can be addictive. Some of the energy sources behave as if they have personality and will, and their will is often inimical to the caster's. If I were still a practising Catholic I'd say that some of them were... demonic."

"I'd probably call them 'neggies'," Lynsey said - "'negative entities', that is. A lot of traditional Western ritual magic involves trying to raise and control those sort of forces, and it's always risky, even though the energies involved can be directed for good ends."

"Yes. Mattheus of Rhyl, in the Middle Ages, used Dark Arts to raise a cone of force which protected a Muggle ship from foundering in a storm, although the energies involved destroyed his body from within and he died three days later. Unless he just had a stroke, of course." He rolled over and settled himself down comfortably alongside her and she shifted to accommodate him, but her mind was still on what he'd said.

"It sounds a bit like... in one of Terry Pratchett's books, _Guards! Guards! _, there were these dragons you could summon which were in some way an expression of the summoner's will, and there'd been this guy who was sure that he could raise one and control it, use it to do good with: but he wrote a book about what he was planning to do, and the book was all crisped around the edges. But what about those... Dementor thingies? Aren't they demonic forces?"

"You would think so, wouldn't you?" Severus agreed sleepily. "But the Ministry doesn't call bargaining with Dementors Dark Arts, because it's them doing it."

"That sounds about typical."

"Yes. The Marauders, too. A lot of what they did was at least bordering on Dark Arts, the bastards, especially the Map which appears to suck energy from the castle to power itself, and behaves like a living and somewhat malicious entity - malicious to me, anyway! - and is activated by an oath of wrongdoing. But it was them doing it, so they were sure it was all right, whereas anything I did was necessarily Dark to them.

"That was the other reason," he added quietly. "Why I became a Slytherin. When I saw that Lily had been Sorted to Gryffindor I might have dropped my plans for a father-figure and a career, and changed my mind about wanting to be in Slytherin, just so I could follow her. The Hat told me I would fit equally well in any house - although I suspect I would have fitted equally badly. But we'd already met Potter and Black on the train, and they were such a pair of unmitigated little shits that when I saw them Sorted into Gryffindor too I couldn't face it, even for Lily - I couldn't face having to spend seven years, the whole of the rest of my childhood, sharing a dorm with them. The idea of - of them being in the room with me while I slept turned my stomach and so I went to Slytherin anyway."

He was so close that Lynsey could feel his breath tickling her skin. "If I hadn't, a lot of things would have turned out differently but I can't swear they would have turned out any better - and I will not dishonour my house by saying that I was wrong."

* * *

**Author's note:**

The automaton-makers called the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre (www. cabaret. co. uk/about/) used to have a small shop and exhibition space at Covent Garden Market, 1984-2000.

"Them that cannae tell the truth should be aye mindfu' to leave an honest, handy lee behind them." - quote from the novel _Catriona_ by Robert Louis Stevenson. _Catriona_ is the sequel to the more famous and widely-read novel _Kidnapped_, which Severus might well have read as a child, and in which Stevenson's fictionalised version of Alan Breck Stewart memorably defeats several opponents in a shipboard sword-fight and then cries "Oh, man - am I no' a bonny fighter?" in an ecstasy of Gryffindorish self-satisfaction.

I assumed in _Mood Music_ that ordinary Transfiguration reverts at sunset, and that it takes special power to make a Transfiguration stick permanently. The logic behind this was that if normal Transfiguration were permanent, a) all those animals who get Transfigured into objects in class would have been murdered, and b) there would be no logic behind the existence of wizarding clothes shops, which we know do exist. Everybody would just buy a cheap T-shirt and Transfigure it into whatever they wanted.

In _Mood Music_, Severus enabled Lynsey to manifest her Power Animal - the form she takes on in astral when she wishes to appear dangerous and impressive - as if it was a Patronus. It appeared as a smallish, scruffy, horrible Velociraptor.

Personally I think that there were probably sound reasons why Albus didn't realise how serious the "joke" played on young Severus had been, and was concerned about Sirius's mental health. But Severus isn't in the mood to be objective.

The Principality (formerly Barony) of the Far Isles is the British end of the Society for Creative Anachronisms. There is a strong overlap between the Principality, the pagan movement and the SF-convention crowd. Members have alias names for use when they are in costume, as do many SF fans: and some of them end up using their costume-names in normal life too.

"Though I am old with wandering / Through hollow lands and hilly lands..." from _The Song of Wandering Aengus_; "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer;" from _The Second Coming_; both by William Butler Yeats.

"I caught this morning morning's minion, king/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon -" from _The Windhover_ by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The song Lynsey plays on the record-player is _The Black Fox_, on Graham and Eileen Pratt's 1980 album _To Friend and Foe_.

The term "bowdlerise" refers to the English physician Thomas Bowdler, who in the early nineteenth century produced versions of the plays of Shakespeare, and of Gibbon's _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, expurgated in order to render them more suitable for (women and) children.

In Tarot, the Strength card has the ability to soften or neutralise any negativity in the cards around it.

"Getting off at Haymarket" is a south-east Scottish metaphor for _coitus interruptus_ - Haymarket being the last stop before the main Edinburgh train station at Waverley.

Hogwarts was founded in the tenth century - over a thousand years ago as at 1992 - but it must have taken some time to build the castle, so I'm assuming the falling-out happened after 1000AD.

According to information given in _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_, Potterverse wizards use "warlock" to mean a wizard skilled in magical combat, a sort of wizarding knight. According to Irish tradition Scáthach, which means "The Shadowy One", was a Scottish warrior-woman who ran a martial-arts school, and taught the Irish hero Cúchulainn. According to some sources she was one of the Sidhe, and the skills which she taught her pupils involved coping with magical creatures and obstacles, so it's reasonable that in the Potterverse she would be a witch. Her fortress was called Dún Scáith (the Castle of Shadows), and many people believe that the real but now ruined 14th C castle in Skye called Dun Sgathaich was built on the site of Dún Scáith.


	20. 18a Not Raving but Drowning

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

This chapter is so phenomenally long that I've had to break it into two parts, otherwise it takes too long to load: but the two parts should be read as one chapter, since there isn't a natural story-break anywhere except at the end of part b).

* * *

**18a: NOT RAVING, BUT DROWNING**  
[_In which trouble is afoot, and matters come to a head._]

He had still something careful in his gait which made her contemplate the word "footsore", but when she tried to ask him about it he flinched away from the question and claimed an unlucky hex to the hip during combat training, which she amused herself by kissing better.

He was working hard at relaxing (a contradiction in terms, if ever there was one) into sex, into being touched: even if he still always needed her to make the first move, and clung to her with what felt more like desperation than joy. He still couldn't bring himself to sleep naked, and he still half expected, at least on a subconscious level, that being seen to be aroused would mean being jeered at and humiliated: but giving and getting affectionate touch shored up his shaky sense of self-worth, and at least sex was a good way of drugging him into sleep without resorting to bottles of purple potions.

Staying asleep, however, was another matter, and it was rare for him to sleep more than a few hours without scaring himself awake. The combined strains of sleeplessness and of his responsibilities to and for the Order were wearing him almost to transparency, and he had taken to putting a Muffliato spell on the bedroom every night, so that neither their love-making nor his sometimes howling nightmares would disturb the couple upstairs.

He hadn't had any more waking flashbacks so severe as to cause him to lose awareness of where he was, but his nights were still an assault-course of horrors which often left him shaking and clawing at himself as if he would tear his own skin off, and even by day any random event - an item in the newspaper, the heated rings on the cooker, a drunken yell in the street - might start up some horrible reminiscence which according to mood he would either choke off and refuse to finish, or state flatly in a voice whose hollow calm was almost worse than shaking and clawing.

Her efforts to comfort him through his twisting, sweating night-time terrors brought closeness deeper than sex and Lynsey knew that she relished that closeness, even as she fretted over its cause: but she was haunted by layer on layer of too-vivid mental images of his suffering. On days when she couldn't stop seeing what had been done to him she had her own ways to distract herself, and she felt the professor's ironic, considering gaze rest on her as she jerked her head to the side, shaking off the vision of his desperate pain, and sought for numbness by listening to bracing music, or singing it over under her breath; by losing herself on the complex paths of coding; by pigging out on curry or by crawling into bed and crashing out until the next time his troubled sleep would wake her.

At least she had managed to persuade him that Nestor and Starbuck weren't going to attack him at a moment of sexual crisis, and the busy little centaurs were always there, pumping and sliding together in the corner, a constant source of inspiration and encouragement. And if, sometimes, he called out another name than hers without even realising it, she held him closer and wished that his love for the sainted Lily could have been reciprocated.

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"We still have to find the Hufflepuff Cup, unfortunately, because even if Eleusinia was right about a Horcrux being used up when the bastard undied, we don't know whether it was this Horcrux or another bloody one we don't know about." He prodded the silver device irritably with his finger, and it made an "Eeep!" noise and shuffled sideways on little metal feet. It looked, Lynsey thought, like the bastard offspring of a Victorian teapot and a robotic, steampunk chihuahua. "This thing is meant to be an 'enhanced divination machine', according to Dumbledore's portrait - at least Creevey's photographic version of the portrait is one thing which is working - but the answers it gives are so bloody obscure..."

"What did you prime it with?"

"Jasmine tea - none of your supermarket rubbish, either. Out of it, you," he added to Starbuck, who was watching the silver device with glass-eyed concentration, and the brown-and-white cat turned his back in frozen dignity, and pretended to wash. "I believe the cup may be with the Lestranges - sodding Bellatrix told me herself that our _Lord_ had entrusted her with 'his most precious' unspecified something, at any rate - but where she would have hidden it..."

"I remember you said," Lynsey said, and indeed she could hardly forget it: it had been one of the snippets of potential clues about Horcruxes which Severus had pasted into her mind with an indelible Memory Charm to make it stick, when they had been roaming the woods and he had been afraid that he would die without passing on what he knew to the Order. "Maybe we could get answers out of that thing like with the Tarot - I mean, asking progressive layers of questions and going for a positive or a negative. Try 'Is the Hufflepuff Cup in Britain or not?'"

"All right." Severus repeated the question, and then watched as the instrument clinked and rattled and issued a puff of green smoke from the spout in its lid. "Looks like... a rosebud. In view of the question I'd take that to mean 'In England', would you think?"

"Mmm - seems likely, doesn't it?"

"All right... in the wizarding or the Muggle world?" Clank. Puff. "Hmm." He sat back, frowning.

"What is it?"

"A wand - that's clear enough. But surrounded by... no, crossing a circle. It looks vaguely familiar, but -" As he spoke, Starbuck sidled up to the floating sign and sniffed at it warily.

"It looks to me," Lynsey said, "like a London Underground sign, only with a wand as the crossbar."

"A wizard place surrounded by - or on top of - a Muggle one, then, and something indicating London specifically. The Ministry, St Mungo's, the Leaky, Diagon Alley, Knockturn Alley..." It was a rumination-out-loud rather than a question, but the silver whatnot shuffled its feet, binged again and spat out a stream of smoke which reassorted itself into a straight, slanting line. The cat jumped back, hissing.

"Bloody hell." Severus stared wide-eyed at the diagonal streak of green. "No wonder Dumbledore always bloody-well knew what was going on. The patent for this -"

"Wouldn't want the Ministry to get it, though, would you? If they'd known what we were planning at Azkaban..."

"Bloody hell." The instrument gave a definite _boiinnngg_ and spat out a stream of green-smoke roundels in an assortment of sizes. Severus gave a slightly hysterical laugh. "Looks like we hit the jackpot."

"Coins, you reckon?"

"Gringotts." The mechanism belched loudly, gave off a final puff of smoke and fell silent.

"In a _bank vault_? That's a bit, well, obvious, isn't it?"

"Obvious, yes." He tapped his nails irritably against the table top. "Arguably, however, it doesn't matter if a hiding-place is obvious, if it is also inaccessibly secure. We know where the Crown Jewels of England are - but it doesn't make them that much easier to half-inch."

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"It's called a Sequel," she said, nodding towards the lines of code on the laptop's screen, "I mean that's esS Queue elL, Structured Query Language, but it's _pronounced_ 'sequel'. Most of them are - well, pre-digested pap, they come with easy controls but they only do a limited range of pre-set tasks, but this is Foxpro which is like, deeply user-hostile, but so much more powerful and intelligent..."

Severus pursed his lips and made a slight but definite self-preening movement of the head.

"Yes, all right," Lynsey muttered, "we know it's not the only thing which is user-hostile but highly intelligent and powerful..."

"I wasn't going to say it."

"Yer were thinking it, though." She looked at him, so calm and able by the light of day; no longer the torn and ragged shadow which was burned into the back of her eyes although his own eyes were hollow with exhaustion. "You are good at this, though: I thought you would be."

He nodded thoughtfully, not bothering with false modesty. "I always did prefer to invent my own spells rather than taking my magic all pre-fabricated and pre-digested, and this isn't that unlike doing your own spell-work."

"Arts and Crafts movement, wizard-style?"

"Mm." He leaned back in the chair, turning his neck from side to side to get the cricks out. "Especially as my own work was usually better..."

"It's a thing most people don't understand," Lynsey said, "especially the press: that programming is just as much an art and a craft as making a copper bangle, or a blanket chest."

"I can see that it is, it's very - individual. And isn't The Craft a Muggle term for magic?"

"Yup. Did I show you my latest toy?" She fished out the solid plastic weight, which rested comfortably in her palm.

"Looks like the remote for t' telly, but I take it it isn't?"

"It's a Nokia 5110 - the latest mobile 'phone."

"Oh! Like something out of Star Trek - oh, I _want_."

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"I'll make a deal with you. You wash your hair every day, and I'll stop eating raw onion sandwiches at bedtime, OK?"

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"I thought about saying your name was Doreen," Lynsey said, "but that's a bit obvious."

"Nah." Tonks flexed her shoulders, altering the size of her bust as she did so. "You told me one of these bods we're meant to be meeting for lunch was called May, so I'm going to be April. What do you think?"

"Very nice," Severus said shortly, rather obviously trying not to be caught looking.

The shape-shifter had added about twelve years of apparent age over her base state, swapped her trademark punk hair for a slightly mannish mid-brown crop, and gained several inches around the chest. "I don't know what you two did to Remus," she said happily, "but whatever it was, thanks!"

"Following you around like a lovelorn spaniel, is he?"

"I thought that was more your style," Tonks said sharply, and Severus winced. Lynsey wondered how she knew - but she had already gathered in conversation with the professor that Tonks's mother had been at school with him and Lily for two years, and had been a Slytherin prefect - a prefect who had scandalised the school by sitting her NEWTs while seven months pregnant, and who had been in the same academic year as her younger sister, born only eight months after her and named for the narcissi which were in bloom at the time. "But, yeah," the younger woman said, relenting, "I mean he's got a lot more confidence in the you-know, the, uh, bedroom department - and he actually let me see him being a wolf this time, and didn't go all 'Oh woe is me that ever I was born' about it."

'I'm glad" Severus muttered, then gave her an eldritch smirk. "Since he's my dog now, I have to see to his well-being..."

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"So, Gordon," May said, leaning forward over the pasta salad and fixing him with a gimlet eye, and Lynsey noted with approval that Severus responded smoothly to the strange name, glancing up without hesitation and with just enough reaction to seem natural; "Lynsey tells us that you and she are...?"

"Oh, absolutely," he said with delicacy, blotting fastidiously at the corner of his mouth with his napkin. "I couldn't have put it better myself." Tonks snorted lager down her nose, and then tried to look as if she hadn't.

Lynsey was amazed to find that the prof seemed to be enjoying himself, both the edgily flirtatious undercurrent to the conversation, and the exercise in deceit. "Ever since we met," he murmured, meeting May's eyes with innocent candour, "in a small side-room during the Yule moot, our involvement has been very... intense." He allowed his Adam's apple to bob suggestively, causing Eck, who was gay, to go quite misty-eyed. "Almost frighteningly so." Lynsey kicked him under the table, and the corners of his mouth quirked.

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"Longbottom," he said abruptly, sinking back into the sofa's soft embrace and taking the weight off his feet, "has asked to be accepted as a full member of the Order of the Phoenix with active duties, instead of just an observer, and that Lovegood and the Weasley girl should be at least allowed to attend meetings. I was surprised that he asked me, frankly - he used to damn' near wet himself if I even looked at him - but I suppose I look like something _pathetic_ to them all now, instead of fearsome."

Lynsey clicked her tongue at him. "He must still see you as an authority figure, or he wouldn't have asked you. Will you accept them?" She offered him a revivifying glass of real ale; he relieved her of it with a languid, black-clad arm and then frowned at her over the rim of it.

"I don't know. Ginny Weasley is not of age yet but it might be easier having her inside where I can at least keep an eye on her and pull rank, than outside doing God knows what without supervision." He took a hearty swig at the glass. "Lovegood - Lovegood is peculiar to the _n_th degree but she has no nerves to speak of, she sails through life in a state of serene unconcern and her spellwork is excellent. And she is of age, so I suppose... God."

"What?"

"It makes me appreciate more why Dumbledore made some of the strange recruitment choices he did. With Black in particular, he was never going to stay neutral and I suspect Dumbledore just preferred to have him on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in. And I'm _glad_ I have some authority over Mundungus, even though the little shit tried to lift my wallet last week."

"And Neville?" She sat down carefully beside him, placing her own half-emptied glass on the coffee table.

"Amazing as it may seem - not least to myself - I asked Potter for his honest opinion of his combat work. His assessment was - remarkably professional and unbiased, and tallied with my own recent observations."

"What did Harry say?"

"That Longbottom has, potentially, a great deal of magical force but he has little focus and less confidence, in part caused by some sort of disability of memory. That his defensive spellwork is 'nothing to write home about' but given patience and encouragement it's not hopeless either, and that in an actual combat situation he has nerves of steel, keeps his head and thinks on his feet - which I may say conjured up a very peculiar image." He set his own glass down and steepled his fingers. "_Apparently_ when they had the fight with Lucius and his Merry Men at the Department of Mysteries, Longbottom was unable to spell-cast due to a combination of a broken nose and not having been taught non-verbal casting by any of the useless twats that Dumbledore hired to teach Defence over the years, so he saved Potter's life and overcame Macnair - Macnair!" he exclaimed sharply, almost gagging as a sudden deathly whiteness chased across his skin, before his composure closed down again like a smooth armour "- by poking him in the eye with the proverbial sharp stick" he finished glibly.

Lynsey coughed, almost choking. "Impressive!"

Severus gave the ghost of a grin. "I thought so, I must say - and that was despite his having been Cruciated by Bellatrix-Sodding-Lestrange only moments previously. Also... ironic. Or something. Macnair apparently was trying to throttle Potter and Longbottom saved him - when only a few hours earlier I myself had intervened to save Longbottom himself from a similar fate."

"In - in battle?"

"No - but in the face of Dolores Umbridge, besides whom the face of battle would look almost charming." He turned to look at Lynsey directly, and she saw his own face was suddenly drawn and skull-like. "You tell me" he said rather wildly, "how I can recruit a seventeen-year-old who has made a personal enemy of Walden Macnair? Yet, if this fight isn't Longbottom's, then whose is it?"

"If Macnair is already his enemy, wouldn't he be - well, safer on active duty than not? Make him look less of a soft target?"

"On one level, but - it will also put him in harm's way... but he is of age, and he knows the risks. In fact he's closer to eighteen than seventeen, and comparatively mature - not that he's up against much competition." He pulled a wry face. "As a spell-caster he's clumsy and heavy-handed - you may remember he tried to Stupefy my hip instead of my head, although I suppose making me limp for a week was a result of sorts - but any pure-blood who has the tenacity and sheer bloody imagination to go on fighting after being deprived of magic, and who's prepared to use his hands against somebody like Macnair, is going to have surprise behind him if nothing else..."

Lynsey bit her lip. "I remember you said that Macnair - that he was the one who... who damaged your feet."

"Yes" Severus said tightly, and shuddered violently. "Why?"

"It's just - I don't believe you, about your hip being the only reason you're limping I mean. You're still having trouble - "

"It's nothing I can't handle."

"If you're sure..."

"Yes. Not that - I don't want to - presume on your care." He held up his hand as she opened her mouth to protest. "The strain on you is beginning to tell, I can see it. I ought to - to remove myself, except I can't bring myself to" _Thank the gods for that_ Lynsey muttered under her breath "but that aside I don't want to - to deal with it right now. The..." He made a vague gesture towards his feet. "It's..."

_Too much_, she understood. "OK - but -" Severus frowned at her, and she spread her hands. "Honestly, you don't have to feel you're making unreasonable demands on me. This is part of what I do, part of being my sort of a witch - it's just making appropriate use of my skills, the same as when you brew migraine potion for me. And you're allowed to expect that people will care about you and want to help you."

"This is not just - a little assistance in passing, though, is it? Why so much care, such - effort put into repairing a, a sour, ill-tempered middle-aged man with a questionable past?"

"Well - it's a witch thing, isn't it - that idea of manipulating people better? And it's a service to the gods and an act of worship - putting right what evil people have damaged. Especially - um, Herne, the Great One, the Horned One, he's a god of male sexuality, so anything which warps that or spoils it for someone is, um, specifically sacrilegious, so putting it right is pleasing to Herne. And it's a way of sticking two fingers up at Lucius and showing that I'm stronger than him."

He jerked his chin up. "Hah - I'm with you on that one, certainly!"

"Short of killing or serious brain-damage, there's nothing he can break so completely that I can't put it right - right?"

"Not even if I were -" she heard his breath catch - "broken beyond sanity, beyond knowing who I was or where I was or what was happening to me?"

"That would have taken longer - about six months longer, probably - but I'm nothing if not persistent and you, my lad, are nothing if not resilient. And, and - one does what one can with what the gods send one. If they set you a task, and you're a witch, you do it: you don't wimp out or, or pretend it was for someone else to do. And there's pleasure in feeling useful, and in exercising skill and knowing that you're doing a good job - you know that at least as well as I do."

"Well - all right. Yes. I can be a job of work..."

"More enjoyable and less mundane than that. There's an almost sculptural element - the same way there is when a surgeon fixes a complex fracture - that sense of stroking all the fragments back into order." As she spoke, her hands mimed the action, smoothing and ordering. "It's a work of art - or of Craft - and you don't stop making a work of art until it's finished. And it's what I do, and - 'I love you without measure', as the song says and, and people should spend time on these things. There's too many people out there who think that when someone has been - traumatized they should be able to just get over it like that, and if it takes more than a few weeks to put right they get bored and wander off."

Severus snorted. "I could name you several Order members who think I must be some sort of feeble, whining weakling because I haven't managed to brush - all that - off yet as if it had never happened, even though they all heard how they - how I -"

"Filius understands though, and Minerva, Harry - it takes months, years, even decades to fix serious trauma, in oneself or in others, but it can be done. It just takes patience and a steady nerve."

Severus nodded mutely, gazing into the middle distance, and then sighed. "Patience - defined as 'a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue'."

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As sensitized as she was, now, to the rhythms of his pain, she woke to find him sprawled on his back beside her, his mouth twisted in distress and his eyes flickering sightlessly behind closed lids, cringing and whimpering softly "Oh please, oh please, no..." When she tried to wake him he opened his eyes and looked straight at her but his breath continued to catch and break in terrified despair. She grabbed his hand, dug her nails in hard enough to get his attention and snapped "Say it with me! Say it!"

"That civilisation may not sink,  
Its great battle lost,  
Quiet the dog, tether the pony  
To a distant post;"

Hypnotized, his lips began to move silently in time with hers.

"Our master Caesar is in the tent  
Where the maps are spread,  
His eyes fixed upon nothing,  
A hand upon his head."

"Say it - come on - I know you know it - "

"_Like a long-legged fly upon the stream_  
_His mind moves upon silence._

"That the topless towers be burnt  
And men recall that face,  
Move most gently if move you must  
In this lonely place.  
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,  
That nobody looks; her feet  
Practise a tinker shuffle  
Picked up on a street.  
_Like a long-legged fly upon the stream_  
_Her mind moves upon silence._

"That girls at puberty may find  
The first Adam in their thought,  
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,  
Keep those children out.  
There on that scaffolding resides  
Michael Angelo.  
With no more sound than the mice make  
His hand moves to and fro.  
_Like a long-legged fly upon the stream_  
_His mind moves upon silence._"

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The Order meeting went on so long that Lynsey was beginning to worry when she saw through the kitchen window the professor's long legs descending the area steps. Drawing the door wide he blew in on a breath of dark air and mist and she could see the excitement humming through his lean frame.

"Whassup?" she said, stepping out into the hall to greet him. "Good meeting?"

"Lovegood - I agreed to Longbottom's suggestion, to let her attend a few meetings and see how well she did, and he was bloody-well right - she had a brilliant idea. She suggested that - well, I can't remember if I told you this but Myrtle Higgins, the ghost in the girls' lavvie where the access-point to the tunnels is, she was killed by the basilisk in the nineteen-forties and Riddle used her death to make a Horcrux. His second, I think - as far as I know he killed his own father earlier than that."

"Uhuh..."

"Anyway..." He shrugged out of his long Muggle-safe coat, hung it up and went to sit at the small breakfast-table in the kitchen. "Lovegood pointed out that so far as we know Higgins's death was an accident, Riddle didn't set out with the intention of killing her she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, so there's a good chance he performed the whole of the Horcrux ritual after her death instead of -" He flinched visibly and bared his teeth. "Instead of preparing it in advance all but the single, final gesture of release which I saw, _half_ saw him make after he killed Lily, and which, even if I can reconstruct it properly, may be too generic to be used to identify Horcrux creation specifically."

"You mean, you think that what you saw may have been a sort of general 'Run' command which could be used to start any pre-prepared spell?"

"Mmm. I've been looking at -" he flinched again. "Looking at it in Dumbledore's Pensieve, what I saw, after Lils was killed and before the side of the house blew out and I managed to get it clear enough to see that it doesn't seem to tie in with any of the descriptions of Horcrux-preparation in the grimoires we retrieved from the Merchieftainess. Filius thinks that the - Riddle - may have perfected a way of stalling any spell just on the point of completion and then setting it in motion later with a single gesture which is - which is a tremendously useful idea, if true, and I'm furious that I didn't think of it myself, actually."

"Aye, well, I suppose just because he's a deranged megalomaniac doesn't mean he's actually stupid - not in technical matters, anyway."

"Our task would be so much easier if he were, but unfortunately he is, or has been, a very great and very innovative wizard."

"Well, then - it's no reflection on you that he managed to have at least one good idea you didn't - especially as he has, what, about a thirty year head start on you?"

"Uh - thirty-three years, I think. I suppose so. But at any rate, Lovegood suggested that if Higgins became conscious as a ghost more or less immediately following her death, which is fairly common, and given that she is... 'very inquisitive' was how Lovegood put it... well, there's a good chance that she might actually have watched Riddle do it especially as - well, 'ogles any half-decent-looking boy any chance she gets' was the way Potter put it, and Riddle was very good-looking, if you like that sort of thing. Are we cooking?"

"There's still a bit of lamb curry left from last night."

"Good - I'm too tired to be very constructive right now."

"So," Lynsey said, deftly wielding her chopsticks to scoop up a wodge of reheated rice and raisins, "does this mean you have to go back to the school to speak to, mm whatsername, Myrtle or is it possible to bring her here to you? I could set up a sance, if you think it would help."

"Ghosts are usually bound quite closely to one location, either the site of their death or to somewhere - or someone - which has great meaning for them... but I can't see the Ministry letting us into Hogwarts again so easily. But aren't sances - well, for contacting those who have truly passed over?"

"Yeah, in general, but you can sometimes use them to contact ghosts who are in the vicinity - not that that helps a whole lot, I guess."

"Well, it might if..." He pushed his plate aside and rubbed wearily at his eyes, flicking back the long skeins of lank hair. "I already sent the doe Patronus to Aberforth, asking him to look into ways of getting Higgins to manifest at the Hog's Head. Apparently she has something of a crush, God help us, on Potter, so if we tell her he's going to be there..."

"Now if he had a 'phone, you could talk to him in real time, discuss it, instead of waiting for him to send a message back."

"Yes - a telephone is less messy and inconvenient than fire-calling and more flexible than a talking-glass, especially that - mobile thingy: one of the many ways in which Muggles outstrip us, though not many wizards would admit it. But a Patronus at least will make sure the message is delivered whenever the recipient is there to receive it, like email or a letter, and unlike email or a letter it can't be faked or falsified, you know it comes from who it seems to come from, and it can obey simple commands such as 'Find this named person at this named location, and if they're not at that location then go to the next nearest Order member'." He made a wry face. "That was how I once got a message intended for Hagrid, from a Patronus which - well, which took the form of Remus Lupin in his fur coat."

"You don't use the warhorse as a messenger?"

Severus shook his head. "The doe is the one Aberforth will recognise as mine, and the Death Eaters, should they intercept her, won't, whereas some of them did see the horse. They never knew -" Without apparently realising it, he started to rub at his left forearm, where a palm-sized patch of shiny new skin marked Lynsey's foray into emergency field surgery. "The Mark - it sets up a connection to the - to _Him_, which interferes with the ability to cast a Patronus. If any of them had ever realised that I still could, that would have landed me on the torture-slab a lot sooner than - than actually happened, because they would have known that I was using Occlumency to shut out His influence."

Lynsey jerked her head, shaking off the too-vivid images of what his landing on the torture-slab had entailed, and put her hand over his where it rested on the kitchen table. "If it was going to happen, then thank the gods it happened when there was an ally there to help you to escape."

Severus nodded once, tightly. "I don't know whether it says something typical about me, or about - about His influence over the Marked, that I ended up with a Patronus who represented my most catastrophic failure and my greatest guilt." He looked up at her then, his eyes dark fire within the deep shadows of his brows. "I love the doe, but she tastes of pain."

"What does the horse taste of, then?"

He smirked his flicker of a smirk. "Pride."

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That night he dreamed, she thought, of Lily's death, tangled up with fragments of his own ghastly protracted punishment. After the churning despair and rage, after the frantic clawing and clutching which left Lynsey nearly as battered as if she'd been wrestling with a pony and the blinded, dazed dislocation from the present as she talked and sung him back into his own skin, he ended up lying on his stomach on the bed, propped up on his elbows with his head hanging and his limp, sweat-soaked hair curtaining his face. Lynsey fetched him a glass of water, and he stared at her sideways through the black strands.

"I don't know," he said; "- don't know how much longer I can go on with this. It would be so much easier just to die, and not have to live through this any more."

"But it would be such a waste of a good man," she said softly.

"But what fucking good am I to anybody in this state anyway? I'm just a burden, to myself most of all."

"Quite apart from your utility to the Order, that's just - _please_ pet, don't. Please."

"You're - begging me? Why?"

Still half asleep herself, Lynsey laid her hand along his sharp, stubble-roughened jaw and stared into his eyes with all the will she could muster. "I'm begging you not to take away the dearest thing I have."

He put his hand up to cover hers and stared back, wonderingly - and then half fell, half lunged forwards with a groan and began to kiss her with an edge of desperation, pressing his long body against hers as if trying to fuse himself with her, until she could feel his heartbeat hammering against his ribs.

Kisses aside it was, she realized afterwards, the first time he had actually initiated sex. As he lay collapsed limply half on top of her, still wrapped around and inside her, Lynsey stirred under him, her whole skin alive with the pleasurable contact and her arms around his still-sharp ribs. She felt a surge of affection like a great swinging rise of the sea, deep and wide enough to drown in, and in her sated, dreaming state she stroked his back and murmured:

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you  
Till China and Africa meet,  
And the river jumps over the mountain  
And the salmon sing in the street..."

But he turned his head and gazed back at her, from the fastness of his dark intelligence, and answered softly:

"O let not Time deceive you,  
You cannot conquer Time.

"In the burrows of the Nightmare  
Where Justice naked is,  
Time watches from the shadow  
And coughs when you would kiss."

His silky voice purred through the catalogue of loss which the poem unfolded, and Lynsey remembered unhappily that there was a distinct possibility that if he survived the war he would outlive her by sixty or seventy years, bereaved by his love for a short-lived Muggle as surely as Muggles were by loving a dog.

"Into many a green valley"

the sad, lovely voice continued like the unfolding history of loss,

" Drifts the appalling snow;  
Time breaks the threaded dances  
And the diver's brilliant bow."

But she put her hand up and ran it through his heavy hair, and answered:

"Life remains a blessing  
Although you cannot bless.

"O stand, stand at the window  
As the tears scald and start;  
You shall love your crooked neighbour  
With your crooked heart."

And they were both, in their own ways, a little crooked and out of shape. A crisis must come, she felt, like a fever breaking, before he could properly begin to recover: but that was a worrying metaphor, because not all patients lasted until their fever broke.

She was beginning to have bad dreams of her own, just to complicate matters, although not ones which woke her sobbing and clawing. She in fact dreamed very seldom, or if she did she didn't remember it: but several times lately she had woken with a blurred, confused memory of seeing Severus dragged from his bed by Aurors or, worse, of trying frantically to save him, either in the caves or in Azkaban, and knowing that he would suffer until he died if she should fail.

Not that she ever did fail, even in nightmare. She always awoke still running madly after some new solution, through a maze of shifting tunnels which led somewhere else on alternate Tuesdays.

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Severus had left his copy of the photographic portrait of Dumbledore in the flat, and after he had gone to his work in Diagon Alley and she had cleared up the breakfast things, Lynsey propped it up on the table. The picture was still, a mere photo' of a painting, gilded frame and all, but she cleared her throat and said "Headmaster...?" and after a few seconds the blue eyes twinkled and the austere expression lifted into a smile.

"Miss O'Connor," the scratchy, tinny whisper of a voice said. "To what do I owe this pleasure?"

"Headmaster - sir. Um, hello. I just wanted to ask you if - if the situation were to become... critical, would I be able to use you, this portrait, as a way of summoning help?"

"By 'the situation', do you mean some form of attack, or Severus's condition?"

"Well, both, either, but - mainly Severus. You know that he...?"

"I am aware that - that the strain of all that he has suffered is telling on him heavily, yes."

"Yes. I suppose that if I had to I could find whatever Order member is watching the house, and get them to summon Poppy, but that would take time and, and risk embarrassing him by making the matter more public than it needs to be. The same goes for 'phoning the Weasleys, quite apart from - well, it's a big house, at four a.m. they might not hear the 'phone."

"You are afraid that he might - take some irreversible step?"

"Not that, so much, but - but if it came to it that I couldn't snap him out of it he could have a stroke, or a psychotic breakdown."

The painting of the old man nodded sombrely. "I can certainly ask Poppy - the next time I encounter her - to carry a copy of this photograph with her at all times. There are certainly potions and spells which can be used to enforce calm in an hysterical subject, although whether that would be effective in the case of - traumatic flashback, is it? - I am uncertain."

"Me, too, but - it would be insurance. Some kind of crisis is coming..."

"Yes; I fear matters are coming to a head. Poor Severus... but I may say that you seem to be assisting him very ably. Getting him to recite poetry was especially ingenious: his own pedantry and love of performing will compel him to concentrate on the lines instead of on his emotional disturbance."

"How do you... have you been watching -?"

"On occasion - when the opportunity presented itself. I was - concerned." The blue eyes glittered. "You need not fear that I have been - as it were - spying on the secrets of the bedroom. My own interests in that line lie... elsewhere."

"I remember you said," Lynsey replied, whilst privately vowing to make sure the photograph stayed outside in the sitting-room. "Can I ask you something?"

"Certainly - although I reserve the right to not answer."

"I was thinking," she muttered, "of having a portrait - I mean a moving one - made of Severus..."

"So that if he should, ah, become a casualty you can still have a means of contacting him?"

"Well - that too, but mainly because - well, he's made a lot of enemies, and I would hate to think that somebody might trap part of his soul into a portrait in order to hurt him there. Having a pleasant portrait left in - in safe hands would ensure he had a bolt-hole, as I understand it."

"Admirably reasoned, I feel," said the old man in that faraway whisper, almost at the cusp of hearing; "both the problem and its solution."

Lynsey felt sick, realising that he thought her fear for Severus was justified. "Yes. But then - well, then I'll be trapping him, won't I, the portrait will - he'll be stuck in it for centuries. And he'll have you for company I suppose, and Minerva since she's Headmistress, assuming his portrait is hung somewhere you have access to, but even so he - I wondered if it would be possible for me to be in a moving painting as well, being a Muggle I mean, so I can keep him company. Assuming we haven't split up or anything, and he still wants me there."

Dumbledore looked at her over the rim of his spectacles, and for the first time the portrait looked discommoded. "That," he said, "is an interesting question, and one I will have to give some thought to. But, ah, offhand I know of at least four horses, two dogs and a parrot who have a fully-developed presence in the portrait realm, so it cannot be _only_ wizards who can exist here - although in each case a witch or wizard was also present in the same picture."

Later, she lit a candle in front of the bronze hare on the mantelpiece, and prayed: "Changer, Trickster; world-turner, law-spurner: break down and build up."

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"I thought we might have this week's meeting here in St Andrew's if - if that's all right."

"Oh, yes, you know I like to see them - if you're sure it's safe. I don't want to risk you - or me either, come to that."

Severus sighed in frustration, and swiped his hair back with his hands, rubbing at his face as he did so. "I wish I could keep you out of it altogether, but once you've become an item of potential interest for Lucius and that bloody shower, you're safer with the Order than without it. I can't see the bastard forgiving a _Muggle_ for breaking his nose..."

"It was worth it though..." Lynsey said, with a reminiscent smile.

Her lover flashed her a sudden, ferocious grin. "It was a moment I shall treasure till my dying day, whenever that will be; but be that as it may, having Order members here to protect us both may attract attention in itself. I've booked a function room for tomorrow in a pub in South Street: I thought that if we held a meeting here in the town, then if they're spying on the Order it would make them think St Andrew's was just a place where we met, not a - a home. And at least here they can wear robes and no-one will remark on it."

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"If you're right," Moody said, glowering into the depths of his beer and refusing to look at Severus, "what about Weasley, here?" He gestured to indicate a rather louche-looking, red-haired young man with an earring and a series of raw-looking ribbed scars across his cheek. Lynsey - whose task this evening was to fetch more beer from the bar and feed sheets of paper to the self-propelling quill-pen which was taking the minutes - surmised that this must be Ron's brother Bill.

"I can certainly find out where the Lestrange vault is, but I would prefer not to deceive my employers," the redhead said seriously, giving the lie to his rough appearance. "They may not be particularly likeable, but they've always dealt honestly with me, after their lights. I also have no desire to be served in a pie - and I'm not sure breaking in is even possible. We can hardly impersonate a Lestrange, since they're all liable to be arrested on sight."

"Are there any rules governing what kind of artefacts customers are allowed to store?" asked Remus, who had possibly never had a bank account in his life before this year.

"No objects liable to damage the bank itself or its employees, or to breach its security - so no unstable explosives, for example." Bill rubbed his chin, absentmindedly trailing his fingers across the scars, which were starred with irregular ginger stubble. "I suppose a case could be made for a Horcrux being a danger to the bank's employees, since we know He-Who can use them to attempt to subvert or possess anyone who gets too close to them." He inclined his head to indicate his sister, who scowled ferociously.

"Could we -" Neville's voice ended on a nervous squeak when he realised everyone was looking at him, but when no-one shushed him he swallowed and went on: "Could we g-get the goblins to denature the Horcrux for us - to remove a danger to the bank, like?"

"Theoretically, no," Bill said. "In practice, possibly yes, if we dressed it up so it didn't look as if they were breaking their word, and offered them something in exchange."

"And what is it that they would want, and that we could give them?" Severus said in his smooth, dark voice. He was leaning with his elbow on the arm of the settle, looking relaxed, commanding and - to Lynsey's eyes at least - very slightly less than perfectly sober. But a little lubrication probably helped him to deal with Moody's combined guilt and suspicion and Filius's loving concern.

[Nevertheless, the shadows under his eyes were evident, and Lynsey saw Harry's green gaze rest on him, measuring and considering...]

"Ownership of the sword of Gryffindor," Bill said flatly. There was an immediate outcry which refused to subside even after he held up the palm of his hand for silence, until Severus rapped on the table with his wand and said sharply "Settle down!

"Explain," he continued, looking at Bill, and the redhead nodded and went into a kind of lecturing mode.

"Goblins," he said, "have always had a very different idea of ownership from we wizards. With the more traditional amongst them, it is their belief that craftsmen - craftsgoblins - retain title to everything they produce, even after a sale, and the object reverts to the maker's family on the purchaser's death. They believe that by willing his sword to his own heirs Godric Gryffindor effectively stole it."

"Godric was no thief!" Minerva protested, as Tonks cut across her: "Did Godric _know_ about this when he bought the sword, or was it an, um, cultural misunderstanding?"

"Thank you, Nymphadora," Severus said smoothly, his eyes fixed on Minerva. "That is the question, is it not? Was Godric Gryffindor a thief, a dupe or merely... ill-informed?"

"Nobody now knows," said the faint, tinny voice of the portrait of Albus Dumbledore. "I have always assumed that Godric bought and bequeathed the sword in good faith, but even that is not to say whether he was misled by the vendor or simply assumed, in his ignorance and arrogance, that a creature as different as a goblin would have the same concept of ownership as himself."

"But it isn't really an alien concept though, is it?" said Hermione in her precise voice. "It's just retaining copyright, isn't it, only over a craftwork instead of a text: just because you let one publisher market your work, that doesn't mean that they can hand it on to another firm without paying you again for it, unless that was specified in the original contract."

"If that's right," Harry said, "could we hang on to the sword but offer to pay royalties for it so long as they promised to let us keep it? So honour is satisfied on all sides, and all that?"

"I don't know," Bill said, frowning. "I don't think that would satisfy the Underminers, the really extremist faction, but most goblins... most of them just want wizards to show some respect for their culture so, yes, a formal acknowledgement of their continued claim to the sword would probably be sufficient."

"We could pay them a chaplet of roses at midsummer..." Luna Lovegood said dreamily. Several people snorted, but Minerva nodded thoughtfully.

"Or any kind of ceremonial token, I imagine, so long as it recognised their continuing claim in a, a _significant_ way."

"Like Professor Snape," Luna interjected, nodding. "He's much better-tempered when people listen to him." Severus opened his mouth and then shut it again, and Minerva glanced distractedly at the blond girl and then continued as if she hadn't heard her.

"Very well: I would have to pass it with the Board of Governors but that should be possible to arrange. But what precisely is it we are asking them to do?"

"To remove the Horcrux from the Hufflepuff Cup," Severus replied; "or permit us to do so, preferably without damaging the cup. Apart from its intrinsic historical value, I imagine the goblins will be more willing to intervene if they can do so without injuring the object entrusted to their care."

Bill nodded. "Then they can claim that they assumed the Horcrux was some kind of magical parasite, like a Boggart, which was infesting the Lestrange vault - or simply deny all knowledge."

Harry grinned at that. "Yeah: they can hardly go to the goblins and complain 'We left a piece of Voldemort in here: where is it?'"

Lynsey noticed that several of those present winced at the name: including Severus, though he responded calmly enough.

"The problem," he said, "is that the grimoires which I acquired from Dumbledore -" he inclined his head to the portrait "- are in agreement that in order to destroy a Horcrux, the object holding it must be put beyond magical repair." This time it was Harry's turn to flinch, slightly but definitely.

Ron held up his hand, a restrained and slightly awkward gesture which seemed designed not to look as if he was raising it in class. "I've been wondering, Sn - sir, what'd happen if we fed a Horcrux object to a Dementor?"

"That is -" Severus gave Ron a sudden, rather beery grin which left the boy looking faintly appalled. "Not bad, actually. I wonder..."

"Well," Bill said, "the goblins probably would allow it access, since it couldn't steal any physical object and probably couldn't harm them..."

"Would the Dementor actually destroy the Horcrux, though, or cause it to die in a way that put it beyond use?" asked Filius in his high voice. "Nobody is entirely sure what Dementors do with the souls they take..."

"If it even peeled the thing away from the cup, that would be an advance," Severus said; "it might give us a clear shot at it without destroying the host object. But we also have to ask whether a Dementor would act against - Him - or not. I will have to consider... But the first step is for William to persuade his employers that the Horcrux, if it is indeed present, is a dangerous intruder which they can get rid of without breaching their contract with the Lestranges." Bill nodded, looking rather grim.

At this point, Lynsey went down to the bar for more drinks, which required three trips with a tray. By the time she had finished they were discussing the infiltration of the Floo network by suspected Death Eater supporters.

"... could be watching every damned route," she heard Moody growl, and Severus nodded soberly.

"The fact that theyve been able to tap into the network and add new destinations without Ministry authorisation does imply that they are..." He smiled at Lynsey as she bent over him to set the glasses on the table. "... 'logged on as root', that is to say, that they have infiltrated the Ministry's control system. Or duplicated it, possibly."

Kingsley, who had managed to make his wizarding robes approximate to the kind of African tribal dress which would pass without comment on the streets of London, replaced his lurid cocktail on the table with a click. "I have been cultivating Percy Weasley -" he began in his resonant voice, and there was an immediate outcry from Ginny and Ron although Bill, Lynsey noticed, stayed out of it.

"That wanker!" Ginny cried, and glared defiantly back at Severus when he raised an eyebrow at her.

Ron and Harry shouted together in an overlapping tangle: "You can't!" "He's Scrimgeour's stool-pigeon!" "... pretended he wanted to be reconciled and it was a lie just to get Scrimgeour into the house -!"

"To the best of my knowledge," Kingsley said in his slow, deep voice, "it was the Minister who deceived Weasley about the purpose of their visit to The Burrow, not Weasley who deceived his family."

"Then why hasn't he been back in touch?" Ron demanded, and Kingsley curled his lip at him.

"Because he was extremely angry that his family assumed that he was the one at fault, without giving him a chance to explain himself."

"If Fred and George were here - " Ginny began hotly, and Severus cut across her: "But they are not."

"_Why_ aren't they? You know they're brilliant -"

"Despite their undoubted intelligence," Severus replied smoothly, "I excluded them from these particular discussions for the same reason that I excluded Mundungus Fletcher. We of the Order must sometimes behave illegally of necessity - but members who behave illegally, even brutally for amusement or personal gain are too much of a liability, other than as mere cannon-fodder: and I prefer not to waste lives unnecessarily."

"James and Sirius -" Remus began but Moody, surprisingly, cut him off, his optional eye spinning alarmingly.

"James and Sirius were brave" the old Auror said roughly, "but they were careless; they thought they were untouchable, they let their guard down and it killed them. A secret army needs brave men who are careful, vigilant; not reckless and cocksure."

Severus inclined his head. "Precisely - and offensive as I may find your twin brothers, Miss Weasley, I don't actually wish them dead. Not often, anyway."

Neville raised his hand nervously; when Severus nodded to him he said rather breathlessly "It's, um, more likely that the Minister tricked Percy than that Percy tricked anybody else, isn't it? I remember when he was prefect, he was always a bit - a bit gullible. People were always playing tricks on him," he added apologetically. "Lee and the Twins used to run a book on what they could get him to believe."

"I'd like to think we could get Perce on-side," Bill said, "for - well, for several reasons. Apart from the family issue, he has better contacts than Dad or Kingsley and Tonks, when it comes to getting access to the Taboo protocols, although Kingsley's probably best-placed to look into this business with the Floos. Have you heard back from Aberforth?"

Severus shook his head. "Not yet: but I still think that Miss Lovegood's idea is a sound one. Minerva has brought me Dumbledore's Pensieve so that I can respond rapidly if - when Aberforth manages to establish contact with Myrtle Higgins. If you think, Kingsley, that involving Percy Weasley is the best way forward at the Ministry..."

"But," said Ron, "we know what an arse-licker Perce is: would he actually go against Scrimgeour's wishes?"

His older brother grimaced. "That's a serious point - more's the pity."

"I know I'm not going to be popular for saying this," Tonks said, absent-mindedly allowing her hair to twiddle into gaudy spikes which twisted and writhed together like Medusa's snakes, "but have you thought of actually involving old Scrimmage? It might be less trouble than working round him," she added over the top of a confused outcry from the rest although Severus, Lynsey noted, was silent, his posture become suddenly rigid.

"How can you say that," Harry's voice cut across the hubbub, "after what that bastard tried to do to Professor Snape -" His outflung hand indicated Severus, who glowered.

"Oh," said Tonks, smiling a V-shaped smile, "but I'm sure _Sevvie_ would be much safer if he and the Minister were to be seen to be working together: that way Scrim couldn't do the dirty on him again without losing face."

"She does have a point, Severus," Minerva said thoughtfully, and Kingsley nodded.

"The Minister," he said, "is manipulative, unscrupulous, vengeful, careless of the actual guilt or innocence of suspects if he can spin a good story around them - but he is perfectly sincere in his desire to protect our world from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Additionally, he seems rather... preoccupied at the moment, and a lot less certain of his own unshakeable rightness."

"I shall lean on him," Horace Slughorn said smugly, linking his hands across his ample belly.

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"Are you tempted to use the Pensieve to - well, to stop the nightmares...?"

Severus hunched his shoulders and looked away from the carved basin. "I told you - no. It's too painful, putting them back. I'd be too tempted not to," he added quietly, "and that way lies madness. And besides - I never know in advance what I'm going to dream about, do I? I'd have to take out half my mind... And I'm damned," he said, lifting his head and straightening his back in pride, "if I'm going to be a coward and back down."

That night, he dreamed of Azkaban and woke whimpering and licking frantically, like a dog, at the scar which still braceletted his right wrist.

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**Author's note:**

The rose is the heraldic state plant of England, along with the thistle for Scotland, shamrock for Ireland and leek or daffodil for Wales.

"Half-inch" = pinch = steal.

Arts and Crafts Movement - a Victorian British cultural movement dedicated to promoting the value of the hand-crafted and individual product over the machine-made and mass-produced.

"A poke in the eye with a sharp stick" is proverbial in Britain as a thing which other, mediocre things are at least better than, along with "a slap in the face with a wet dishcloth". E.g. "How was your steak pie?" "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." means that the pie wasn't really very good, but it wasn't awful either and it filled you up.

According to Terry Pratchett a true witch says "Someone should do something about this, and that someone is me." But I can't have Lynsey actually quoting that, because its from _Wee Free Men_ and that hadnt yet come out at this point.

"'I love you without measure', as the song says" - the song in question being _Sweetheart Come_ by Nick Cave.

"Patience - A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue": from _The Devil's Dictionary_ by Ambrose Bierce.

Dumbledore says that Tom Riddle killed his own father "In the summer of his sixteenth year". I suspect JK Rowling is mixing up "his sixteenth year" with "the year he was sixteen" but it's unlikely Dumbledore would make such an error, so this amounts to a definite statement that the patricide - and therefore probably the creation of the ring Horcrux - happened when Tom was fifteen, during the summer between his fourth and fifth years, before he opened the Chamber of Secrets and many months before Myrtle was killed.

In GoF, Myrtle says that Olive Hornby "went to the Ministry of Magic to stop me stalking her, so I had to come back here and live in my toilet." but there seems no reason why the Ministry should have actually bound her to a toilet, as opposed to binding her to Hogwarts or simply forbidding her to approach Olive, and in any case we know she has a range of probably some hundreds of yards, since she can go into the lake or to the Prefects' bathroom. I assume, therefore, that she only had two options - to haunt the vicinity of the place where she died, or to haunt a person to whom she had formed a violent psychic connection - and the Ministry removed one, rather than chaining her to her toilet as such.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you" from _As I Walked Out One Evening_ by WH Auden. You can see the complete poem here: www. poets viewmedia. php/prmMID/15551 .

A chaplet of roses: there are cases on record from the Middle Ages of tenants paying a purely ceremonial rent of this kind - a crown made of roses, a single basket of fish or similar - to a landlord or patron, who had granted them their land effectively rent-free in return for continuing formal acknowledgement of their overlordship.

"Logged on as root" - 1990s expression for a person whose password gives them access to modify the "root directory" C: where a computer's operating system is stored.

Cannon-fodder: unskilled, expendable soldiers whose use in warfare is to be thrown against the enemy's guns and killed or wounded, in order to exhaust the enemy's ammunition before more skilled soldiers move in to the attack.

To "run a book" is to accept and pay out bets.


	21. 18b Not Raving but Drowning

**Disclaimer:**I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

This chapter is so phenomenally long that I've had to break it into two parts, otherwise it takes too long to load: but the two parts should be read as one chapter, since there isn't a natural story-break anywhere except at the end of part b).

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**18b: NOT RAVING, BUT DROWNING**  
[_In which trouble is afoot, and matters come to a head._]

"I've found her!" said the silver goat in its old-man voice, wavering in and out in the bright light from the window. "Come without delay."

On the Saturday morning which was three weeks after their trip to Hogwarts, Severus slipped the Pensieve into the same miniature yet bottomless chest he had used to convey Dumbledore's instruments, and Lynsey slipped it into her duffle-bag. Trailed at a distance by a shabby tramp with one spinning blue eye, they walked along the road to Abbey Court, which was far enough from the house not to immediately draw attention to it, and quiet enough to Apparate from without being overlooked, and then Severus spun them round and in and down and then out again into a Hogsmeade afternoon. Which was raining.

Cursing, Severus waved his wand to shield them from the worst of it, and they squelched up the side road to the Hog's Head where it lay close against the rising ground below the Hogwarts wall. Severus, Lynsey noted, was limping badly. When they entered the old pub, Aberforth jerked his head to them to call them over to the bar, and Harry stood up from the window-seat where he'd been slouching and joined them, with a polite nod to Severus. Many of the customers scattered about the cramped room craned their necks at them as they went past: on several of them the action did not look quite human.

There was a public stair next to the bar, with a faded sign and an arrow suggesting it led to lavatories on the right and bedrooms to let on the left, and Lynsey wondered why Severus flinched when his eye lit on it, and looked away, his mouth setting into a grim line. Aberforth gave him an ironic, glittering look before hustling them through a door behind the bar itself and into a small space at the foot of a second, evidently private staircase.

"Go on up," he said gruffly. "I'll join you in a bit." They passed him and ascended the narrow, creaking stair to a shabby upstairs flat. Four doors led off from the small landing at the top; one, half-open, led to a tiny kitchen but Severus tried the other doors, revealing first a bathroom, with a bath in which - as Lynsey's experienced eye and nose told her - someone had recently been making up bran mash, then a glimpse of an unmade bed and finally a sizeable but dingy sitting-room containing a rickety sofa, a moth-eaten armchair, a small table with four spindly wooden chairs and a Victorian writing desk covered in peeling veneer. At the far end was a small fireplace, above which hung a portrait of a blond teenage girl with the slightly dazed expression of the mentally impaired, painted standing in front of a partially open door and wearing a mixture of wizarding and Victorian Muggle clothes. As they came into the room the painted girl inclined her head and smiled vaguely.

There was a sense of presence, Lynsey could feel it, a waver in the air - but Harry said "Hello Myrtle, it's, uh, good to see you", as casually if he were talking to a living girl. There was no answering sound that Lynsey could hear but a sensation of words in the air, words she couldn't quite resolve but she could feel the intention behind them, which was flirtatious. Severus stared directly at a space by the fire.

"I take it you can hear her - as if she was talking normally?" Lynsey said quietly.

"Yes," he muttered distractedly, and took a step towards the unseen presence. "Miss Higgins - I take it Aberforth told you I wished to speak with you?"

The words arrived in Lynsey's head without sound, encapsulated, like something written in a cartouche.

[He crept. In by the loch. When I was _watching_...]

"I am aware of your - proclivities" Severus said stiffly, and the unheard voice giggled maniacally.

[...saw _you_, poking about just now, being nosy - listening at doors - ]

Lynsey could see Severus struggling to bite back a sharp retort. Drawing a deep breath, he spoke with his lips flattened against his teeth, a smile pasted on over a snarl. "At present," he said, "I am interested in you - and in how you died. Your memory could be of inestimable value..."

[ - to you] the presence thought/said angrily, [but I'll still be stuck in a toi-toilet ...body t-to _talk_ to - ] Underneath the first thought, Lynsey caught the wisp of a second thought: _no boys with nice bums to look at_-

Behind them, Aberforth stepped into the room, the floorboards creaking under him. "You'd be famous," he said in his raspy voice. "Lot o' people would want to talk to you, and if you do it right, the school will reopen and the students will come back."

"That's right!" Harry agreed. "Everyone will want to hear your story and - and maybe you won't be tied to your toilet any more, if you help defeat Voldemort."

Severus gave him an odd, complex look - feeling respectful, Lynsey thought, but surprised to be feeling it. "That's... an excellent point. It might give you -" his lips twisted as if he had bitten on something distasteful - "'closure' and enable you to move on, either into true death if you wish it, or at least to a new location where you will have more opportunities for amusement."

[-_pose_so] - the contact Lynsey had broke up like a bad telephone connection, then re-formed - [to know?]

Severus sat down carefully at the table and held out his hand to Lynsey, who silently passed him the miniature chest containing the Pensieve.

"I understand from Potter," he said carefully to what, so far as Lynsey was concerned, was wavering air and a half-seen shape in the corner of the eye, "that just before you were - were killed, you heard Tom Riddle speaking in another language, possibly Parseltongue, and then you met the basilisk's eyes and..."

[..._died_... like lamps, all glowing...]

"I would like to know, firstly, how soon after your death you - er, regained consciousness."

[...know ... not long ... was still there...]

"Riddle was definitely still there, in the bathroom - you're sure he hadn't been away and come back on a subsequent occasion?"

[No no - my body was still warm - it was _creepy_'n' he - he was staring down at me, at it 'n' he didn't know - ] Lynsey jumped as the shrill giggle broke through briefly into physical audibility, like the screech of a gull. [...called me back 'n' he didn't know, he was turning it round 'n' round in his hand an' he didn't know what he'd got...]

"_What_was he turning?" Severus exclaimed and the giggle spiked again.

[It - in his ring, the Resurrection Stone - but he didn't know... I didn't tell him, I just watchedhim...]

At mention of the Resurrection Stone Aberforth sucked in his breath audibly and Lynsey could see that Severus's back had gone rigid, as if he were holding his breath; but he said only, carefully, "And did you see or hear him perform any spell words or gestures, then or later, relating to your, ah, body or to a small book...?"

[...book - oh yes... threw it through me, they did -]

"I'm sure she didn't mean to -" Harry began, but Severus cut across him, quellingly.

"But did you see Riddle himself perform any action with the diary?"

[... pulled a piece of himself out and put it in the book. He thought there were no witnesses but _I_saw what he did...]

"That was clever of you, and very brave" Harry said, batting his eyelashes at the waver of presence, and Severus nodded sombrely.

"He is a dangerous foe. Do you think that you would be able to put that memory in a Pensieve, so that your - your cleverness would be put to good use? To help destroy the man who killed you?"

[... like that, I'll show him! ... make him a ghost, so I can chase ... ] For a moment the ferocity of the spirit's will twanged through the room like a plucked guitar-string; but then the unheard whispering cut in again on the edge of perception: [... too faint, too far, can't...]

"This is about as far from the castle as she can show herself, I reckon," Aberforth said. "I wasn't even sure she'd be able to come this far. It's only really because there's a tunnel to Hogwarts nearby..."

Lynsey cleared her throat nervously, attracting the attention of the three men (the young, the ancient and the prematurely careworn) and, she felt, of the ghost. "Are you - is she - saying that she isn't physically present enough to, um, manifest ectoplasm?"

Severus raised both eyebrows. "Very possibly."

"Well, uh, I don't really do mediumship - not a lot, anyway - but she might be able to, um, channel herself through me and use me for extra power and a source of, uh, physical material." And added, to Aberforth's sceptical expression, "It's perfectly safe - nearly."

In the end it was no harder than any other clairvoyant session she had done - easier, in some ways, because she didn't have to exert herself so hard to translate for the spirit voice, since her three "clients" could hear it better than she could. She packed herself away into the wings of her own head and let the rather sweaty presence of the ghost girl take centre stage in her speech and motion centres, let it speak and act through her, as she sat at the battered table with the carved bowl displayed in front if her.

As before, when she had stood by Severus as he took back the memories of torture, she saw a confused jumble of excerpts from the images which were being pulled through her, were being wound into skeins of semi-real psychic matter and poured into the bowl. These memories were nearly as disturbing as the others, though in different ways.

There was the handsome boy who radiated chill and who appeared to be talking animatedly to a tap, the memory's sense of him informed by a combination of righteous indignation and covert lust; then the great snake with its eyes that no-one ought to be able to look into and live yet here she was, looking at two shining lamps in Myrtle's memory, green-gold and brilliant and deep as wells, and she could feel them trying to suck her soul out of her body even here, like this.

Then there was a falling into those well-like eyes, a dislocation, moving into the glass-clear yet insubstantial sense of the astral, the beginning of the journey into the realms of the dead which, as a clairvoyant, she had taken many times and always come back from; and Myrtle was coming back too, she was wrenched back and dumped, dead but not gone, into the same Gothic-looking bathroom where the tail-end of the great snake was just sliding out of sight down the pipe in the wall, the chilly boy was staring down at the body of a plump, acne-ridden girl, looking vaguely horrified by the turn of events and rolling a ring with a black stone over and over in his hand...

Then the same boy had gone, had come back clutching a book and a silver knife. He was chanting, performing strange gestures, he cut the heel of his hand and dripped blood onto the book, he was pulling from his forehead strands like the strands which Lynsey was, under the ghost's control, pulling from her own, but whatever the dark boy was drawing out smoked and writhed...

Distantly, as the pictures flashed across her inner eye, her outer eyes saw that the blond girl in the picture over the fire had walked away into the background and was talking to a scarecrow figure half glimpsed through the partially open door - Albus, she realised suddenly, but looking much younger and with red hair. Either Severus or Harry must have brought their photographic copy of the headmaster's portrait with them, giving him access to the house.

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"What's hedoing here?" Aberforth demanded, staring up at the portrait as Lynsey nursed a rather grubby glass of Firewhisky and tried to shake herself back into her own head.

"Talking to Ariana about her death, as each or either of us should have done long ago," portrait-Albus replied. His voice was much stronger and clearer than when he spoke from the photographs, and his face was radiant.

"And what good's _that_do? Whichever of us fired the shot which killed her -" Behind the old man, Severus's hand tightened on Lynsey's shoulder.

"But that's just it -" Aberforth's brother replied: "she told me that none of us did!" He turned commandingly to the vague teenager in her Victorian clothes. "Ariana, tell him! There's a good girl."

Ariana walked to the front of her frame, putting her hands up against the inside of the glass. "N'body shot me," she whispered. "I thought you knew."

"But you _died_- somebody must have -"

She shook her head. "You were all shouting, angry, it was scary - I could feel the magic building, inside of me, you were all shouting and I was 'fraid I'd kill you dead like I killed Mama, I tried to keep it locked up, not to let it out but -" she put her hands up and touched her head, her heart. "Something broke, here."

Aberforth got up, blindly, and began to light the lamps. "You're still to blame, Albus," he said thickly. "If you hadn't brought _him_into the house..."

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"It's the same bloody ring, I know it is." He banged his hand down on Lynsey's living-room table and glared at portrait Albus, who still looked confused and disturbed. "I saw it on your hand old man, and then I saw it on _His_hand, in that." He gestured wildly at the Pensieve.

"You knew that the ring was cursed, and a Horcrux," the faint voice said, "and I know Horace told you it was a ring which Tom Riddle used to wear when he was his student."

"But you didn't tell either of us it was the bloody Resurrection Stone, did you? Was that why you put the damn thing on?"

"I was - tempted."

Severus drew a deep breath. "To speak to Ariana?"

"Yes. To - to say how sorry I was, if it was me who..."

"If you'd told me what the bloody thing was, I might have been better able to treat you! Where is it now?"

The portrait of the old man sighed minutely. "Inside a Snitch in Harry's pocket, charmed not to open until he goes to meet his death at Voldemort's hands."

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"It's probably just as well - I'd be too tempted to use the bloody thing."

"To - to speak to Lily?"

"Yes. Not that I - not that I have much hope she would forgive me," he muttered, looking away and down until the curtains of hair swung forwards to hide his face. "But I would like the chance to - to tell her how sorry -"

"I'm quite sure she knows," Lynsey said, laying her hand on his arm. "She will see you: it's only you directly hearing her answer which is lacking. And I hope her answer would be better than you expect - but if not, you're better of without it."

"I suppose so - God, I sound like Myrtle Higgins."

"She's a peculiar girl: I feel sorry for her, but letting her inside my head was a bit - a bit icky."

"She died on the cusp of puberty, poor little brute: all that sexual tension and nowhere to put it." He flicked his hair back and gave Lynsey a sideways grin. "I remember when I was a student, she used to pour herself out into the loch and spy on the mermen having sex - and on me, when I went swimming. If I caught her at it she'd pretend to shocked modesty, but her gimlet eyes have been glued to my naked arse many a time."

"It's such a nice arse, a girl couldn't help looking."

"I'm glad you approve. Really." He had been wrestling with the grimoires again, comparing what was on the page with Myrtle's memory, and was thrumming with tension, but he smiled at her again, a little sadly. "I've done as much as I think I can with the Horcrux spell for tonight: it's not time-critical in any case, because it will take at least another week to get the access we need at the Ministry. Your eyes should at least see what Myrtle Higgins has seen, I think, and I said I'd show you..." Carefully, precisely, he poured off Myrtle's hard-won memories into a flask and stoppered it, and then fetched a second flask from one of his personal shelves and emptied it into the bowl. "I made a copy of this while I was in Diagon Alley - so as not to attract attention to this place by doing active magic."

Although the flask was quite small - a quarter of a pint at most - the contents expanded to fill the great stone basin almost completely, lapping up to the rim in a swirl of white halfway between vapour and fluid. Following Severus's lead, Lynsey leaned down and dipped her face into the shimmering surface, her temple brushing against her lover's as they dived in.

And dived it was: as soon as her eyes were submerged she found herself falling forward into deep water with Severus beside her, looking slightly insubstantial. For an instinctual moment she started to panic, flailing, before realising that she couldn't drown and didn't need to breathe because she wasn't physically here, although she wondered whether her mouth and nose were under this - this - whatever it really was, the substance which was generating this hologram.

That was what it was, she knew: a three-dimensional film strip, which they could observe but not interact with. As Severus took her hand a younger version of himself glided past unseeingly, heading down into the depths, his feet lengthened into flippers and the pink slits of gills pulsing along his neck. The boy was as she had expected, sallow and gawky, his black hair undulating like water-weed, too greasy to separate properly into individual floating strands, and his impressive nose cleaving the water like the prow of a boat: but his young limbs were long and fine, he appeared slender and coltish rather than scrawny and he had, indeed, a beautifully-sculpted backside. Not to mention other parts in which she had an intense personal interest, although she resisted the urge to perv over a boy of fifteen or so - even if he had since grown up to share her bed.

The young swimmer was mother-naked apart from a long, narrow holster strapped to his right thigh. Faint scars already flecked his young back and backside, although nothing like as many or as deep as he would have as an adult, and his left arm was innocent and unMarked.

To the left of them Lynsey could see sun-dappled shallows, the light dancing over flat stones protruding from the silt, but the boy was heading into deeper water and they turned to follow him.

It was a peculiar sensation, swimming without really swimming; halfway between real swimming and astral projection. She was aware of the smooth glide of the water and yet the sensation was distant from her, although her lover's hand on hers was warm and real; they moved their legs to keep going forwards but she felt that it was only habit and they could have flown if they'd wished. A shoal of silver fish darted and swerved to avoid the naked boy, but Lynsey felt several of them swim straight through her as if she were smoke, and the sensation was hollow and tickly, like the proverbial butterflies.

The floor of the loch dropped away beneath them as they swam, the light still glinting dully off stones scattered across a plain of mud from which sprang clumps of tangled black weed. A few pieces of rotting wood lay about amongst the weed, shed by the trees along the shore half visible through the surface distortion, and more fish picked about the fallen branches, looking for bugs.

Severus's younger self grasped at the water with webbed hands, driving deeper, and the man he would become followed him down. The surface was now only a distant glow, while ten feet below them a smooth field of waving, pale green weed stretched away like grass into the distance ahead of them.

Twice Lynsey thought she saw a malign face watching the swimmer from among the long weeds: the second time she pointed to it and Severus beside her murmured "Grindylow". The young Severus ahead of her drew his wand and rolled over in the water, bringing it to bear as a flurry of activity sent several creatures like green, web-footed monkeys soaring up out of the depths to tear and claw at him. For a moment Lynsey was breathless with fear before common-sense reasserted itself: obviously, the boy had survived, or his thirty-eight-year-old self wouldn't have been swimming beside her. Even so, she caught her breath when one of the creatures managed to claw a long score across the boy's calf before it was rebuffed, and a dozen more rose from the weeds, homing in like sharks on the dark trail of blood.

"Don't worry" the Severus beside her said, his voice echoey and unreal, as the gilled boy mouthed an obscenity and slashed at his own leg with his wand, sealing the wound, before drawing a wide arc which caused the water to boil and roll, tossing the Grindylow pack away from him like birds blown by a hurricane. Before the predators had begun to re-orient themselves the slender white shape of the boy had shot away and deeper, gliding smoothly over the descending underwater meadow towards an expanse of black mud.

"They clear the land around the village," Severus's echoing, dreamlike voice said beside her as he swam, "so they can see if anything tries to sneak up on them." As if on cue, a vast, dark shape sailed overhead and to their left; but Severus-the-boy put up his webbed hand and waved to it, and a lazy tentacle waved back.

The light down here was dim: here near the floor of the loch they could see clearly only for a few feet now but in that near darkness they passed by a group of children: the same grey-skinned, dolphin-like merpeople they had met before, appearing suddenly almost in front of them and then disappearing behind. They had with them a tame Grindylow on a lead, and seemed to be encouraging it to dig for worms.

They sculled on into the darkness, following the gleaming white shape of the swimming boy, with nothing beneath them but mud and the occasional scuttling thing, the waterscape featureless and empty. Then in an instant the walls of a stone hut reared up in front of them. As they swerved to avoid its green-streaked walls Lynsey glimpsed through a window an interior dimly lit by some sort of bioluminescent life, neat hammocks of woven waterweed hanging from the beams and a merman skilfully gutting and cleaning a fish at a stone table...

They followed Severus-that-was around the edge of a tangle of huts, some of them with their own small gardens of edible or ornamental underwater plants, to a towering boulder which looked as if it might have been left over from the building of the castle above them. It was painted with scenes resembling cave-art in style, and showing merpeople of both sexes doing battle with a kraken: perhaps Hogwarts' own giant squid, perhaps a monster out of history or story.

The boulder marked the entrance to something resembling a street. As they sailed down it Lynsey could see that the huts on either side tended to be grouped into little courtyards, with navigable alleyways in between, but this was the only clear, fairly direct route.

The younger Severus looked impossibly exotic here among these grey, fin-tailed people, with his gleaming-pale skin and his coal-black eyes, his rangy long-boned limbs and his straight, heavy black locks, so unlike the wild, grey-blond tangle of the merpeople's hair: but few of the villagers remarked on him as he passed. He seemed to be a known figure here.

"Over there," the adult Severus said with a wave of his hand, and Lynsey followed his gesture and saw the same girl she had last seen lying dead on a bathroom floor, here looking definite and three-dimensional and yet mostly transparent, like a statue made of grey glass. She supposed that she could see Myrtle - who was currently spying through a window on the mermen within, her eyes big and round behind her round glasses - this clearly because this was Severus's memory, and he had been able to see her - or would have been had he been facing the right way. As Severus the boy went past, ghost-Myrtle peeled away from her window and began to undulate after him, as if she were part of the water.

They rounded a last group of huts and found themselves in an open space surrounding a rough-hewn statue of a reclining merman: a god or a famous leader, perhaps. His stern face could have been either, but she bowed to him anyway, in case he was Father Poseidon. Spread out around the statue were what Lynsey supposed were market stalls, though there were no tables and most of the wares were restrained in weighted nets and lobster-pots to prevent them from floating - or in some cases swimming - away. A substantial crowd of merpeople - a couple of hundred Lynsey thought - glided from stall to stall with flicks of their wide tail-flukes, chattering together in dolphin voices like the creaking of a thousand rusty gates.

There was not only food on offer, and what might be pets, but belts of fish-skin and splendid-looking rough, tribal jewellery; spears and knives with finely-wrought stone blades; toys and ornaments carved from stone or driftwood and flat slates painted with pictures and with regular patterns which Lynsey took to be writing. She wondered how they managed to paint underwater: the slates could be painted at the shoreline and left to dry in air until the colours were well-set, but the rock at the entrance to the town was a different matter. Oil-based pigment-sticks, perhaps?

Payment seemed to be by barter, and indeed Lynsey several times saw shopkeepers exchanging goods with each other, sometimes selling them on again to an insistent customer a few minutes later. It was, she realised, not so much a market as a mass bring-and-buy sale. They passed among the stalls, trailing behind the naked boy and the ghost, whom the mer people seemed unable to see. It had been strange enough to meet the mer people at the surface, or the goblins and house-elves, but this dimly-lit underwater township was fantastic to Lynsey; she knew that she had stepped into the pages of a science-fiction novel and was looking at a genuinely alien world. It was as crisp and clear as if she had been truly present here, and yet she could move among - and sometimes through - the shoppers and peer at them from all angles without disturbing them, and she knew that if she missed an incident she could re-run it. She shuddered with sudden chill at the realisation that Filius had watched Severus's torture in equal definition and detail.

Meanwhile, the boy he had been had stepped into a quiet corner between two houses and gestured with his wand. "What's he - you - doing?" Lynsey asked, and the man that boy had become snorted.

"Showing off. Or being lazy, depending on how you look at it - it was easier to go to the village empty-handed and then summon whatever I needed from the lakeside, than to swim carrying it."

As they watched, the boy put his hands up to catch a rack of stoppered vials which was descending rapidly through the water. Two mer-girls who had been watching him applauded, and he visibly soaked up the admiration and stuck out his hairless chest, attempting to look more manly. Then he spun around, hearing Myrtle's giggle, and shouted "Oi!"

"It was easy enough," the older Severus remarked, "to be naked among people who were themselves naked and thought nothing of it and I, uh, liked the sensation of swimming nude: but being ogled by somebody wearing clothes was different somehow. More... exposed. Even if she isdead."

"Got to sympathise with her, though - you had a very nice bod."

Behind him the ghost batted her eyelashes at his younger self, retreated to a safe distance and kept on looking whilst pretending not to.

They watched as the boy, muttering to himself, found the stall he wanted and began to barter his vials of potions for a necklace of coarse-cut, honey-gold and yellow butter-amber. "Did you get it?" Lynsey asked softly as the figures around them began to run down like clockwork toys, slowing towards immobility as the memory neared its end.

"Yes," he replied, equally quietly. "It was a present for her, of course."

As the scene faded out, Lynsey distinctly saw the group of children with their tame Grindylow whom they had passed earlier out on the plain, proffering a basket of worms and insect-larvae to a stallkeeper in return for a stone board-game.

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"I always liked the sea," he said afterwards, "but I was never much good actually on it."

"Seasick?"

"Horribly."

The memory of the merpeople's village had been beautiful and strange, but it had left her freighted with sorrow, knowing how much suffering and regret was coming to that slender youth - even if his natural resilience and capacity for finding his own amusements where he could had mitigated it.

"A penny for your thoughts, he said, and Lynsey shrugged awkwardly.

"I was just thinking that - well - you know - that he was heading for a rough life, that boy. And he hadn't exactly had it easy up to then, either."

"There was a song," Severus said softly. "I heard it the other day spilling out of a pub doorway on the Muggle side of the St Martin's gate, there were - these crowds of tourists and commuters milling about on Charing Cross Road, people overflowing out of this dark interior onto the street and with them came - this:" - and his clear, sad voice welled up for a moment and hung in the air like the scent of rain.

"For all the roads we have to walk are winding,  
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding;  
There are many things that I would  
Like to say to you.  
I don't know how..."

Lynsey shivered. "I always did think that song was creepy - beautiful, but creepy. I've said it before," she said, "but you have a lovely voice: it's a privilege to hear it."

Severus put his hand up, covering his mouth. "I told you that he - that Riddle - he slit my tongue, and then mended it again so he could hear me beg. That wasn't the only time he - but singing with you, singing with you I got my voice back, it became mine again."

"I'm glad - that I managed to help, I mean - and I hope I've succeeded in giving you your body back too."

Severus sighed. "That's a rather taller order. And seeing him, Riddle, seeing him again like that, in Myrtle Higgins's memory..." He shuddered. "I know intellectually that he was a coward - so afraid of losing his fine looks and his faculties to age that he poisoned what he was trying to preserve, warping himself into that ugly - but I just bloody wish I could stop feeling him touching me." He turned and looked at Lynsey, as from a great distance. "His touch is like ice."

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When she woke, it was close to dawn and Severus was tangled in the sheets and thrashing, his eyes shut and his mouth open. As she reached for him he began to howl, horribly, jerking and wailing in rhythmic jolts. The sudden violent noise was overwhelming: overcome by panic Lynsey grabbed his shoulders, calling his name, trying urgently to reach him through whatever he was reliving - no not a rape, she thought, the beat of the insane, interrupted howling was too slow for that - he jumped and twisted under her hands, hysterical with terror, she tried to shake him awake and his eyes flew open but whatever he was seeing it wasn't her, the howl rose to a crescendo, the lightbulb in the ceiling popped and he was going into convulsions, squealing and shrieking like a rabbit in a trap -

As the glass on the bedside table burst, showering her with water, Lynsey thought for a brief moment of calling Dumbledore and getting him to summon help, but then the fierce hard rush of her own competence closed down over her, her certainty that this was something she could do, and left her giddy and drunk with power. Without thinking about it she grabbed hold of his hand and began to sway, chanting aloud above his frantic misery.

"_Listen to me_. This is my place; no one comes to this place without my permission; I permit nobody to come to this place who would harm you; I will sleep across your door as a hound and no-one will come near you except I permit it, and I permit no-one who would harm you..."

That did seem to get through, enough to make him recognize her as a friendly presence, because he suddenly lunged towards her, buried his head against her chest with a choking sob and then was miserably sick over both of them. But at least he was conscious, after a fashion. Trying not to feel queasy in response, Lynsey wrapped her arms round him and stroked the back of his head, making soothing-scared-horse noises. "What is it? Tell me, pet - if you want to."

He clung to her silently, still jerking spasmodically and sucking in air in harsh gasps, but eventually he mastered his own breathing enough to answer her in a low, grating voice. "Macnair - my feet - they were only light blows and they were spaced out, a couple of seconds apart, and at first you think 'This isn't going to be so bad' but they kept on, and they kept on, for so fucking _long_..." He choked again and started to cry quietly. "After the first hour or so every blow, every blow shot through me as if my bones, my nerves had turned to molten iron. As if nails were being driven through my whole body with every blow, from the feet up. Down. He had my feet in the air. Trapped on my back like a beetle. Stupid. Ugly. From the feet down."

Holding him close, Lynsey could feel herself shuddering nearly as badly as he was doing. "Lucius and the rest still had their f-fun with me in other ways while he was doing it, but Macnair - athlete, rower, never rested - not even for a moment, not even when I fainted." His normally smooth voice was broken and rough, almost keening. "He just kept on, and on - "

"How long did it go on for?" she asked, dreading the answer but knowing that at this stage what he needed was not to be coaxed out of his fit, but to be encouraged to talk and given permission to cry some of the poison out.

"Don't know - long time - hours - half a day, maybe - Every time," he said, choking, "every time I blacked out Lucius brought me round again and it was still happening - I prayed, I prayed for a stroke to end it but he dropped my blood pressure until I was dizzy and then force-fed me Pepperup to keep me conscious, and Macnair just went on whipping me and the pain, the rhythm got inside my head, I couldn't dissociate from it - by the time the skin started to tear I was foaming like a mad dog, shrieking, pleading, vomiting, shitting myself and he said that he had hardly started- " He clung to her, as damp and sticky as they both were, and she hugged him and rested her chin on the top of his head, rocking gently as tears ran down his face and soaked through her clothes. "He was quite correct" the harsh, choking voice went on inexorably. "You saw the state of my feet - that degree of destruction took him - hours more. I thought I would go mad with it: I'm not sure that I didn't."

"Hush now - you're sane enough to be getting on with. You were never anything less than sensible and competent that I saw, even _in extremis_."

"But he's in my head - he's in my head, and I can't get him out. In my head it's still happening, it's always going to be happening oh God, oh please oh please, make it stop..." He clutched at her desperately, with such force that she knew he would be leaving bruises. "It will never stop happening."

"Shussh now. Everything is always happening. You are also always singing with me in the dark; you are also always sitting by the fire in the woods; you are also always giving a paper at some conference somewhere - it's just a matter of which 'always' your mind is re-visiting at the time. You are always here with me and I am always holding you."

He tried to nod, but instead ended up heaving convulsively in her arms and retching again. "You know that begging does no good," he murmured against her shoulder, "that nothing you can say or do will make it stop, but you can't hold it in, you scream for mercy anyway even - even knowing how fucking useless it is. And I know now that the whole fucking Order could hear me, the whole bloody way through it, which makes the whole thing so much more fucking delightful." Lynsey tightened her arms around him in a fierce grip, and he tucked his face into the hollow of her neck.

"Hours - _hours_ before he'd finished," the inexorable voice went on, "something in my throat tore and then I couldn't even scream any more, just make these stupid, gurgling, embarrassing noises - but the next day was Christmas Day and He - he _Himself_- stroked my throat with those cold fingers and gave me my voice back - so they would be able to hear me properly. That was His Christmas gift to me - the ability to scream for him."

Lynsey felt sick and faint with the knowledge of how completely terrible that Christmas had proved to be, but she could do nothing but hold him while he wept, stroking his hair and murmuring "Ssh, ssh, pet, my dear, you have a beautiful voice, in three more days you were singing up power for me..." and feeling like bursting into tears herself, until the tension went out of his shoulders and he relaxed against her, limp and shivering.

After about ten minutes he pulled away from her. In the half-light she could see that tears had run not only out of his eyes but out of his nose, and she winced in embarrassment for him as he tried ineffectually to wipe his face with his hands. "Damn," he said, in his normal bitter, brittle voice. "What a delightful prospect I must be - crying in a bloody pool of sick. I'm sorry you should have to put up with me."

"Don't be an arse - I'm not even going to dignify that little shard of self-loathing with a response. Look at me." When he did so she cupped his face in her hands, running her thumbs symmetrically from the crease over his nose out along both curving eyebrows, and down round his cheekbones to rest on the corners of his long mouth, which twitched upwards slightly in response. "That's better." She leaned forwards and kissed him lightly on the forehead. "Come along my dear - we'd better both get cleaned up."

They ended up sharing a shower together, propping each other up in a way that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with mutual, companionable exhaustion, and it being easier to soap someone else's back than one's own - although looking too closely at her friend's back provided an unhappy reminder of how much he had to be traumatized about. But he was a strong one, even so, and a nice, solid warmth to lean back against, standing with her spine against his chest and then tilting her head back onto his shoulder so that they were cheek to cheek, with his arms wrapped around her and hot water sluicing over them, slicking his long hair to his skin, his chin coming to rest pointily on her shoulder and both of them half asleep on their feet.

Afterwards, they were so weary that rather than rummage out fresh night-clothes they stumbled back to the bedroom together naked. As they entered the room the professor's eye lit on the centaurs, still beavering away on their shelf in the corner: he clicked his tongue with a "Tchah!" noise and then fell into bed and into Lynsey's quiet embrace, skin on skin, and didn't shy away - which was progress of a sort, she supposed, even if it was only because he was too exhausted to be tense.

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When Lynsey woke the next morning Severus was lying sprawled on his face beside her, still half asleep. "How do you feel?" she asked casually - trying hard not to sound as if she was poor-thinging him.

"Stiff," he replied: "and not in a good way."

"Do you wantto feel stiff in a good way?"

"Mmm." He gave her that flicker of a smile of his, looking lazily amused, and she put her hand on his shoulder and guided him to roll over onto his back.

She had told him that the quest for pure sensation in sex was an optional extra, and she had meant it: but on the other hand, she thought that he deserved to have someone care to give him a little pleasant sensation for a change. As she trailed her fingertips lightly down across his stomach he sighed and shifted restlessly, responding to her touch almost at once; but at the sight of his own erection his muscles tightened and his dreamy expression became set and taut, still unable, Lynsey knew, to break the connection between being seen to be aroused and being mocked and humiliated.

"Sshh," she said, kissing his bony knee which happened to be the nearest part she could reach, "you're perfectly safe. Safe and admired and lovely, I think so anyway, but if seeing yourself still disturbs you I can hide it from view soon enough, and you don't have to look..."

"No I -" He gave her a crooked smile. "I want to watch, it's very - you know, erotic, and it makes me feel that my - well, that being, um, 'stiff' is _acceptable_, not bad or or dirty or... or a presumption by somebody too ugly ever to be desired," he finished quietly.

"You aredesired, very much. Not just by me, either - May said I was a lucky cow, and I thought Eck's eyeballs were going to come out on stalks. Even Tonks preens herself when you look at her."

"Hah." He wriggled down into a more comfortable position on the sheets. "I just want to be able to be... happy and uncomplicated in bed, like -" He jerked his chin expressively in the direction of the busy little centaurs. "Not that they're in bed, as such, but you know what I mean."

"Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Sshh now." She stroked her thumb across sensitive skin, circling gently until he shifted and gasped, and then bent her head to give him as much pleasant sensation as she knew how.

When her tongue encountered scarring on what should have been smooth flesh - the relic, she already knew, of an inventively awful half-hour involving Bellatrix and a razor-blade - her gut clenched in sympathy; but it didn't seem to interfere with sensation, to judge from his response. It made her smile to see him arch his back and clutch at the sheets, his long hair fanning out across the mattress like black water, and his breath halting and catching softly in a seizure of pleasure rather than fear.

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It was fortunate that it was a Sunday, anyway, so that it was possible to have breakfast in bed and then lie-in companionably. Severus insisted on getting up to make breakfast himself, and Lynsey did not seek to prevent him, not wishing to hurt his already red-raw dignity by suggesting that he couldn't cope; so she contented herself with fussing a warm dressing-gown around his bony shoulders.

He still looked desperately tired, his eyes sunken into dark hollows, but he was relaxed and - for him - unusually amiable. They ended up with him lying with his left hand behind his head and his right arm round Lynsey's shoulders, and an expression of dark amusement on his narrow face. Both cats were piled in a hot furry heap against his left side, and Lynsey curled up happily against him on his right, with her head pillowed on his upper arm. After a while he rolled over to face her, smiling, and kissed her with lips which tasted faintly of marmalade, and they drifted into the easy rhythm of love. As they moved together, peacefully, she smoothed his hair and called him "My good lad, my lovely lad" - but he called her "My refuge, my homecoming."

Afterwards, though, he lay on his back with his long fingers laced behind his head, suddenly serious. He turned his face towards her and said clearly "I never, neverwant to live through last night again."

Lynsey grimaced unhappily. "It was - terrible, even to an outside observer."

He nodded tiredly. "What Macnair did - it wasn't the most degrading thing, by far, nor even the most painful, but it was the thing that took me closest to true madness, because of the - relentless, inescapable rhythm of it. I can still feel it eating into my head like disease - a negative version of the way you used rhythm to break me free, but this was just to break me. Did break me. God!" he said vehemently, "I thought that I was - evil, when I was a Death Eater, because I sometimes hurt people - in combat, when I was eaten up with passion and rage. But to spend hour after hour deliberately driving someone round the bend in that cold, meticulous, _passionless_way, as if it was some sort of, of foul meditation exercise - without even anything to gain by it, except the pleasure of watching another human-being writhing and squealing in agony..."

His dark eyes were glittering, and Lynsey reached out gently to brush a tear off his cheek. "Try not to think about it, pet."

"No! That's wrong I - I need to think about it, I think. If I try and push it away it will just come back at me as soon as my defences are down - and if you enjoy having me throwing up over you in the middle of the bloody night, I for one don't. I need - need to be able to think about it rationally, to let myself believe that it was something which had time and limit - something which is over."

"All right - I can see that I think. How will you...?"

"I need your help I think - I don't think I can go through it alone. I realize of course that I have no right to ask..."

"Tsk. Stop fishing for reassurance - of course I'll help you. Any way I can."

"Then just - hold me, please. Remind me that I'm not alone."

In a way it was the previous night all over again: him in her arms, gasping and shuddering, and her stroking the back of his hair and crooning to him, calling him my hinny lamb, my beautiful, my raven darling, my lad of parts - but it was all different, because he was wearily calm even as his muscles twitched and jerked to that awful remembered rhythm, and quiet tears rolled down his face.

After a long time he whispered "It still hurts - that's part of why I can't get free of it, I think. I ache, all through my bones: a lot of that is from the Cruciatus, but some of it..."

"Well, then" Lynsey murmured back; "there are things I can do for that, to ease it." She broke free of his hold and moved away, raising his two hands to her lips and kissing the backs of them before letting go. "Wait on - I'll not be long."

She slung a dressing-gown on and went and fetched a selection of blended massage oils from the bathroom: Joints Ease, and Muscle Ease, and Relaxing Oil, which was basically lavender with added bits, and tea-tree and peppermint lotion, which was especially for feet. Returning, she remembered to turn the heating up, since she was going to strip the covers off him, and the day was far from warm.

He was lying face-down as she had left him, shivering and crying in that careful, controlled, silent way. She sat down on the bed beside him, peeled back the sheets and began to work the soothing oils into his muscles and joints, gently flexing his elbows, wrists, shoulders as she went, and digging her fingers in with firm, even pressure. And as she did so she sang softly in Gaelic, "Come on my love, _hu il oro_," and worked his sore muscles with her hands in rhythm with the song - that same song which she had used to reach him when he was hanging in chains of fire.

After a few minutes, he turned his head to look back at her over his shoulder. "I hadn't realized before," he said sleepily, "but the rhythm - the fall of the main stresses is exactly the same pace Macnair used when he - beat me." Lynsey stopped at once, appalled - but he shook his head in irritation. "No- don't stop. It helps. I can let the music get into the spaces in my mind where the, where the pain was, and that's - soothing."

So she worked her way down the length of him, singing steadily, while he drowsily catalogued all the ingredients in the oils she was using, from smell alone. His calves in particular were tight and hot with cramp, but Lynsey pressed down with her thumbs, loosening all the knots of pain until he lay sprawled across the bed as loosely as an unstrung puppet. She could still see the scar the Grindylow had left him, a thin line of silver tracking across his right calf.

Eventually, she sat bent over his narrow feet, using her fingertips to work cooling lotion into all the complex, damaged little muscles. "That feels - very bloody odd" he said sleepily. "No - dont stop - _good_odd. Peppermint, tea-tree and - aloe vera?"

"Yup. You have plantar fasciitis on both sides, that's a given, but it feels to me like you have some adhesions here, as well: that's probably half the problem. I really should do this every night until they ease up."

Severus sighed, flexing and easing his long toes under her touch. "Be my guest. Please."

* * *

**Author's note:**

"For all the roads we have to walk are winding" - chorus of 1995 song _Wonderwall_by Oasis.

Plantar fasciitis is a painful inflammation of the band of connective tissue which stretches along the sole of the foot from heelbone to toes.

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Thanks to Aurette for the brainstorming session which finally got my disconnected jumble of odd scenes and cryptic notes sorted into some kind of half-coherent order so I could get this chapter written.

Barring fatal accidents I will eventually get this story finished. At this point, there are only around six more chapters to go, depending on where I decide to put the chapter-breaks, and I am fond of both the characters and the story. At the same time I am now vaguely dissatisfied by it because the more I analyse the books, the more I realise that my original take on the characters was too heavily influenced by fanon.

I can still just about support the idea of ReallyEevil!Lucius, even though his portrayal in DH has made it less likely and, of course, the long hair is pure Warner Brothers. How we read Lucius depends, I think, on whether or not it was he himself who thrashed Dobby severely for burning the dinner - a point which canon leaves open. If it was, if he beat an unresisting servant half his size with his own hands or wand instead of saying "Go away and punish yourself", then that suggests that he is a physically sadistic control-freak who gets a kick out of hurting victims who aren't enjoying it, and since he is a member of a paramilitary organisation and accustomed to indulging his own whims, he would probably have become the kind of monster he is in this story. OTOH, if it was a more senior servant who beat Dobby, or Dobby's own parents, Lucius would still be a smug, bigoted, amoral prick willing to advance his family by extremely shady means, but we'd have no reason to think he was anything worse than that. Post-DH I am now leaning towards the second interpretation, but I can still just about make a case for the first one.

I've also realised that the idea of the Death Eaters as wholesale recreational torturers and killers owes much more to fanon than canon. The evidence in the books is unclear. We're told that many Death Eaters tortured Muggles, but Voldemort uses the term "Muggle torture" to describe the baiting of the Roberts family, which wasn't much worse than what the Marauders did to Severus: so we don't know if "Muggle torture" in general means bloody atrocities or aggravated bullying. Harry says that Voldemort kills Muggles for fun, and there's evidence of some random recreational Muggle-killings after the Death Eaters take power in DH; but prior to that the only Muggle killings we actually know of were apparently done for practical military reasons, e.g. to exert pressure on the Ministry. We know that the entire families of Order members were sometimes killed in Death Eater attacks but there's nothing in canon to say whether this was a deliberate policy of brutal terrorism, or collateral damage while going after what they saw as a legitimate target.

Every native-born Briton of my/Rowling's generation grew up with terrorism as part of the daily background of our lives, and there were I believe twelve terrorist attacks on mainland Britain during 1996 when JK Rowling must have been working on the first Potter book, including the Docklands bomb in London and the one which took out much of central Manchester: so home-grown terrorism would have been on her mind. Despite the elaborate, grotesque masks used in the films, in the books the Death Eaters' masks are just cloth hoods with eye and mouth-holes, very similar to the masks worn by the IRA, and many specific events and debates to do with the Death Eaters or with the Ministry's handling of them match up closely with similar events and debates in the real world of British terrorism and the British government's handling of it.

Therefore, I now think it very likely that Rowling intended the Death Eaters broadly to parallel real British paramilitary organisations. And with a few exceptions British paramilitary organisations have not, on the whole, made a habit of gratuitous cruelty or of intentionally targeting civilians, although they have often been perfectly willing to kill civilians as collateral damage if they got in the way. There were eighty thousand people within range of the bomb that took out central Manchester, and not a single death, because the IRA warned the police just in time to evacuate the area.

So, I no longer quite believe in the take on the Death Eaters which I have used in this story, and I've also realised that the term "Dark magic" as used in the Potterverse applies to any magic which is transgressive or "alternative" in some way - anything from monstrous evil which warps the very fabric of magic itself, all the way down to Goth lifestyle accessories. I can still just about justify the way I have presented these topics, and Lucius, in this story, but I would hate for anyone to take this story as evidence that this is how Lucius, the Death Eaters and Dark magic necessarily arein canon. It's still a possible interpretation of canon in all cases, but it's not the most likely one.

You can find a page about British cultural references in the Harry Potter books, including parallels between the Death Eaters and real-life British paramilitaries such as the IRA and UVF, at www. whitehound. co. uk/Fanfic/Britrefs. htm, and an essay on the nature of curses and Dark magic at www. whitehound. co. uk/Fanfic/Sectumsempra. htm.


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